Old Spice has taken the use of social media to the next level. Recently, Old Spice launched a YouTube viral video campaign, with their spokesman responding to comments left on the Old Spice Facebook and Twitter accounts. Each video included the name of the original user who made the comment or statement – most responses lasted 30-60 seconds. The Old Spice spokesperson even goes as far as smashing a pirate pinata with a freshwater fish in a video response made just for Demi Moore. The Old Spice YouTube profile has total upload views surpassing 59 million…not too shabby.

If you haven’t seen one of the Old Spice TV commercials , you probably live on another planet. If that is the case, you are probably more worried about your crazy neighbor parking his Corellian YT – 1300 freighter too close to your Naboo Royal Cruiser. Since we are on Earth, I will try and focus on what is going on with us boring Homo sapiens.

For a long time, social media represented a channel where your customers talked about your products or business, and you prayed that discussion was positive. Now, organizations continue to find and experiment with new ways to penetrate this channel and find new ways to interact with their target customer base instead of sitting on the social media sidelines.

However, before you jump into the “game,” make sure you stretch and remember these 3 things:

• Use the dialect and language your customers are using. If Old Spice sent a formal press release responding to tweets and posts, the message would’ve been lost because of the way it was delivered.
• Keep your communication short and to the point. Diatribes are meant for Shakespeare and your journal; meanwhile, your audience prefers frequency and freshness.
• Keep the conversations going. Don’t try to stop them. Your tendency will be to resolve things, but whether it’s positive or negative, showing the interaction and attention is where you score brownie points with your audience. Facilitate and encourage additional participation and you will learn that much more about your audience.

Does your social strategy stink? Reach out to me to learn more about what we’re doing to help our clients cash in on social media…

Check out The Old Spice Experiment

Compete

I’ve been using Compete.com since day one. It’s an amazing tool for getting estimates on the traffic of a website. They have a huge base of U.S. users that get counted as visitors to your website, should they land on it. It’s only U.S. traffic for now, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt since it’s based on their users. That said, it’s the most accurate website traffic estimation tool I’ve ever used.

Open Site Explorer

The guys over at SEOMoz have come up with an amazing tool in the Open Site Explorer (OSE). My colleague and friend Mike P. likes to refer to it as “Yahoo Site Explorer on steroids.” Once you check it out, you’ll see the guy makes a good point. It gives you all important metrics of your backlinks, including the number of root domains and the URL of The big differentiator between OSE and Yahoo Site Explorer is that OSE only shows the top 25 links from any given root domain. Yahoo will show you thousands of links from the same URL on different pages, which isn’t nearly as effective or helpful.

SpyFu

SpyFu is the ultimate PPC competitive research tool. It will show you what keywords your competitors are advertising on, their average daily spend, their average cost per click and more. If only it showed conversion data…

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is the most accurate estimate of traffic out there. It’s ideal for keyword research when thinking about what terms to go after for SEO, what keywords to focus your PPC on and even for good ‘ol research into a new niche.

AdWords Wrapper

Michael Wong’s AdWords Wrapper is a huge time saver when creating or expanding AdWords campaigns. It will automatically create different match types of your keywords lists and let you copy and paste them out into your account.

FireBug + Web Developer Toolbar

These two Firefox add-ons are geared primarily toward web developers, but I use them to my advantage as a marketer as well. I’m constantly using them to quickly see if links are follow/no-follow and to see if client and/or prospects’ websites have all their on-page SEO elements in place. Get FireBug and the Web Developer Toolbar today.

I don’t know my customers.

I heard this from probably about half of the eTailers I consulted with. They’ve built some big businesses on the web and continue to grow each year, but have little idea who their customers are. Without really knowing your customer, it becomes more difficult (and more expensive) to target the right person online; and, once they’re on your website, to maintain the scent. Here’s what I suggested:

On-site feedback/surveys – Simply asking your customers a series of questions is the most direct way of finding out who they are. Stress to them the importance of feedback on your site, and offer a prize or hold a contest to entice more users to complete the survey. You can use a 3rd party such as Kampyle or you can do it yourself. Start with simple questions like the sex, age and location of your users. I would also recommend including more advanced questions around education, salary, online buying habits and family/marital status.

Usability studies – You can outsource usability studies to 3rd party companies who will identify your user groups. You can have them give general feedback, or ask them to perform specific tasks on the website and see how they do. This will paint a much clearer picture as to how web-saavy your customers are, their browsing habits, interests within your website (what stands out?) and more.

I can’t do that with my platform.

I sat down with companies working with all sorts of eCommerce platforms. They ranged from custom, in-house platforms to more commercial software such as Miva, xCart, OSCommerce, and Yahoo Stores. Their biggest challenge with my recommendations (design, development, testing, etc.) was that they simply said “I can’t do that with my platform.” I think just about anything an eTailer or consultant can dream up is possible on the web, but one must definitely consider the time and cost involved, and the potential return on investment for the given project.

My suggestion to these eTailers was an upgrade. If you’re severely limited by your platform and you keep building on top of it, you’re going backwards. An outdated, inflexible platform can limit everything from your ability to carry out A/B and multivariate tests to being able to effectively communicate with your back end software.

The executives at my company don’t want to implement my ideas.

One of the benefits of working at a smaller company is that your ideas are heard and most of the time, they’re implemented pretty quickly. This was the case with many of the smaller eTailers I consulted with; they were constantly coming up with their own ideas to build traffic, increase conversion or make their site more user-friendly.

My advice to eTailers in this all-too-common situation was to get proof. Present the data on a very high level and be straightforward. Do you think implementing a new 3rd party piece of software will save the company money? How much will it save? How long will it take to implement? Who’s going to set it up? If you’re trying to get the resources for an A/B or multivariate test, make sure the goal and predicted outcome(s) of the test are defined. If you spend $5,000 on a design variation of your home page and test it, what’s the potential for additional revenue? Will that one-time $5,000 investment lead to an additional $20,000 in monthly sales?

Aside from having a plan and being visual, provide the executives with concrete examples. Find case studies on the web where other retailers have shown improvements with testing, or how much money they saved by investing in a new eCommerce platform. Some eTailers told me that they had the most success with telling their owners/executives “Amazon did it and it worked.” Other big eTailers would work just as well, but everyone knows Amazon. Mentioning other big name companies that have had success with implementing new ideas is especially important to executives who may not know a whole lot about the eCommerce world, but can relate to the commercial success of other big brands.

New isn’t always better. Website redesigns can get expensive, so it’s tempting to just start redesigning little pieces here and there. If you’re getting your email newsletters looking nice and Web 3.0 (sorry, I had to) but your site is still looking like it did in 1998, you may find yourself taking a few steps backwards. Don’t get me wrong, update your email newsletters. The key is to not get caught up in the glitz and glam of modern design trends if they don’t match your site, or your company branding.

The disconnect. We’re all worried about “conversion,” after all, it is the benchmark for how effective we’re being. The more inconsistency you have between clicks the more likely your bounce rate is going to increase. And more bounce = less conversion.

So this is just a friendly reminder to keep your online marketing efforts synced up with each other.

Here’s a quick list of things you may want to double-check for consistency:

• Email newsletters
• Banner advertisements
• Social media backgrounds (Twitter, YouTube, etc…)
• Social media avatars (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…)
• Your blog’s design
• Landing pages
• Your checkout

Your Site Load Time

If you haven’t heard by now, web surfers are extremely impatient when it comes to page load time. In a recent study conducted by Forrester Research for Akamai, 47% of web consumers expected a page to load in three seconds or less; 40% would abandon the site if it took more than three seconds to load. (Thanks to GetElastic for the data.)

Free: I would recommend trying Pingdom for starters. This tool will load up everything on the page you test and give you a time frame for how much each part of the page takes to load. This is especially helpful for you to recognize if certain parts of a page (larger than expected images, for example) are slowing down the entire page load process.

Pay: Another great tool for page load time analysis (among other things) is ClickTale. They’ll show you your fastest and slowest loading pages and give you even deeper analytics into how the page load time affects visitor behavior. They even have a free version for you to get started if you’re just curious how it works.

Holiday Shipping & Promoting Your Physical Locations

Whether you have a physical store or not, you absolutely must have a holiday shipping schedule listed prominently on your site. The closer we get to Christmas, the more sales you will lose if you don’t clearly tell your visitors if and when packages will arrive. Here’s a great example of a holiday shipping schedule on the current website of one of our clients.

Physical locations and in-store pickup can be huge during the holidays, especially when it comes down to the wire and people are worried about online purchases arriving on time. If a visitor doesn’t believe their package will arrive in time, they won’t bother ordering it online. If you make that same visitor aware that you have in-store pickup available, you probably just saved a sale.

Double Check All Your Error Messaging

Double checking your error messages is mindless and boring, but the findings can be extremely beneficial. Not having proper error messages is one of those gaps in eCommerce sites that can be costing you revenue. What if someone keeps making the same mistake in your checkout and you never tell them what they did wrong? Or, even worse, you tell them the wrong thing? What if they don’t notice the error message? It’s not long before they’ll get frustrated and abandon your site, costing you a sale and reducing the changes they’ll ever return.

The best way to go about doing this is simply to dive in and start making some mistakes on your own website. Try to make a purchase without adding a physical address, without an email address, or without a valid credit card number – make any possible mistake or combination of mistakes that a user could possible make. Are you helping or hurting your visitors when they make a mistake?

Setup Holiday Offers/Banners

If you haven’t done so already at this point, setting up and promoting a holiday special is essential, such as a sale or free shipping. Even if your products aren’t big around the holidays, adding a holiday theme to your website can go a long way. One of the biggest things I ask myself when shopping online and landing on a website is – how do I know anyone is still working at this company? What if this is an old website that was abandoned? Will my order ever get processed? So, for me, the holiday theme lets me know that the site is current and being updated; therefore elevating my trust. In turn, I am more likely to make a purchase.

Ensure Cross-Browser Compliance

This is something that should’ve been done when you initially developed and launched your site, but I’ll give those of you with older eCommerce sites a break if it wasn’t. Take a few minutes and open up your eCommerce site in the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Since older versions of IE still get lots of use, read up on my post about how to test your site in different versions of IE. If you’re really picky about web standards and cross-browser compliance, then I also recommend you download and test in Rob’s favorite browser, SeaMonkey.

Does your site need a last minute holiday brush up? Let us give you a free 30-minute holiday site review. We’ll take a look at your site and let you know what you can do to ensure maximum performance for the 2009 holiday season.

Check out the screenshot below to see the ad along with Google suggest:

Have you noticed anything different with Google lately?

If more and more users are turning to their phones for internet use, how does this affect Google? Ben Kunz over at Business Week reports that “Google can now fit about 10 ads on a standard computer screen…but on your cell phone, if you type in a search query at google.com you get only one or two paid ads in response.” By that calculation, Google can only display between 10 and 20% of the volume on a cell phone as compared to a computer screen.

The more that users look to their cell phones to spend time on the internet, the less ads Google will be effectively be able to display. This translates to advertisers not being able to attract as much traffic to their websites, and ultimately paying a lot less to Google for their ad campaigns. Of course, Google, being the innovator that they are, recognizes this threat and is acting accordingly. They’ve announced an “Open Handset Alliance” to design open source, universal platform for cell phone users. Translation: they want to figure out a system that will make more room for ads, and they want to make sure everyone is using their system.

Read the full story over at Business Week for more details!