Last week I attended a wonderfully informative meeting of the Web Managers Roundtable organized by Julie Perlmutter and hosted by the World Bank. The two presenters were:

• Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski, Communications Officer at the External Affairs office of the World Bank
• John H. Bell, Managing Director and Executive Creative Director at the 360° Digital Influence division of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide

Here are several of the ideas on developing a social media strategy, adopted from the Ogilvy presentation by John Bell (who also blogs about the World Bank’s take on social media):

Ideas for using online visibility and search

• Search Visibility - Increase the probability that people who research your company or related issues find what you want them to find, including helping your target audience to make the connection between risk factors/symptoms and your company’s public health campaign.
• Multimedia Visibility - Use existing visual or audio assets to promote word of mouth, mobilize allies and improve search engine results
• Content Syndication - Distribute your content via trusted web sites to improve search engine results

Ideas on information sharing

• Internal Blog - Share information between offices for to allow for a quick response when a crisis arises. Share information and materials among and between stakeholders.
• Wiki - Engage a coalition or a community to work toward a common goal.

Ideas for building an Engagement Toolbox

• How to monitor cgm
• How to create an influencer audit
• How to do an online visibility audit
• How to create an engagement plan
• How to create commenting guidelines
• How to create corporate blogging guidelines
• How to reach out to bloggers
• How to manage a crisis
• How to launch a blog
• How to use del.icio.us
• How to publish & publicize multimedia

The Financial Times today posted in their Digital Business section an article summarizing the findings of a new comparative study of how the websites of the 60 biggest corporations — 20 from North America, 20 from Europe, and 20 from the rest of the world — rank in terms of serving its main constituents and overall accomplishing what a website is supposed to accomplish. The surprise is in the composition of the winning list, the FT Bowen Craggs Index:

“Of the top ten companies in the rankings, eight are European based; just two come from the US.”

As a European living in the U.S., I welcome such studies which should encourage us all to learn from each other, regardless of where we come from. The Silicon Valley is not the whole world, and that is a good thing.

I just received an email inviting me to participate in a self-evaluation of my email marketing savvy.  The problem with the message was that the links that was supposed to lead me to the online questionnaire was disabled by my Outlook email client:

Whose fault it was? My Outlook was being proactive in creating a safe environment by disabling links that might lead to an unsafe site (whatever the criteria for this is). Outlook did give me the option of enabling the embedded links by clicking on the top of the tool bar. I enabled the embedded link by making that extra click simply because I decided to use this annoyance for a topic of this post. However, it is very unlikely that I would do that otherwise for a message from a sender I am not familiar with.

Which brings me to the point of email marketing effectiveness and its link with web usability. An email is effective only if it engages the reader and sends them to a website for an action. If I am not compelled to go visit the website, the email did not achieve its goal. If the design of the email prevents me from visiting the target website, it has nobody else to blame for its failure. The email should make it not only compelling for me to click on that link but easy as well. Adding a simple text/HTML link would have solved the problem easily.

I am sure Alterian are very experienced marketers. But everybody can learn and we never stop learning. Taking the time to test their own email campaigns would probably teach Alterian a lesson or two about email marketing effectivenes.

eMarketer posted results from a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa among attendees of the ad:tech asking them what online marketing approaches worked for them the best and the worst. The top three among the most successful online marketing tools were:

• Pay-per-click marketing
• Email lists compiled by the web site
• Search engine optimization

This is consistent with the results of a client of mine, Studio Lotus, who saw their organic search engine traffic increase 68% from September 2006 to January 2007, based on a successful, well-planned web redesign. A small but very targeted Google AdWords campaign seems to be producing good results for them, and where I see a lot of untapped potential is fully utilizing the contact list accumulated through the web site’s contact form. It is heartening to see that best practices indeed produce good results.

Nielsen/NetRatings updated its report on the search engines’ market share in the U.S. [PDF]:

• Google - 48.2% (in January 2006) vs. 47.1% (in January 2005)
• Yahoo! - 22.2% (in January 2006) vs. 21.2% (in January 2005)
• MSN Search - 12.8% (in January 2006) vs. 12.8% (in January 2005)

comScore Networks, on the other hand, measured lower but growing market share for Google in January 2006:

• Google - 41.4% (in January 2006) vs. 35.1% (in January 2005)
• Yahoo! - 28.7% (in January 2006) vs. 31.8% (in January 2005)
• MSN Search - 13.7% (in January 2006) vs. 16.0% (in January 2005)
• AOL - 7.9% (in January 2006) vs. 9.6% (in January 2005)
• Ask.com - 5.6% (in January 2006) vs. 5.1% (in January 2005)

These percentages are based on an estimate that 85% of the total U.S. internet user base, or 146 million people, visited a search engine at least once in January 2006.

While the shares of the main search engines haven’t changed much since last year, the total search traffic in January 2006 has grown by 39% (according to Nielsen/Netratings) or by 11% (according to comScore) since a year ago. Whether you use the Nielsen/Netratings’ numbers (5.7 billion searches) or the comScore’s ones (5.48 billion searches in a single month), an average of 3 searches per user on a typical day (based on the 60 million daily search engine users in the U.S., estimate by the Pew Internet & American Life Project) begs the question: do search engine marketers overpay for their traffic, and if so, what is there to do?

The growing importance of search engines as a marketing channel would explain the growth of search engine marketing (SEM) spending only partially. When you compare the SEM annual spending growth, estimated at 277% by MarketingSherpa at a recent web seminar, to the 39% growth of search engine traffic, it becomes obvious that as many as the search engine users are they are not enough — too many of the search engine marketers are competing, and overpaying, for too few eyeballs.

While the fear of the competition might be a big factor for the keyword bidding craze, my guess is that the biggest reason why marketers so willingly part with their dollars is because they do not measure the return on their marketing investments. This is where the importance of web analytics and organic search engine optimization come. One enables the other. Unless you grow (organically), you cannot sustain your business. Unless you measure, you cannot manage. Unless you manage, you spend your online marketing budget at your own risk.

About 1 in 6 internet-using adults in the U.S. have sold something online, reported the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The move to online transactions has enormous implications for one of the major revenue streams for newspapers: classified ads. This also indicates how timely is Google’s move into classified ads, with its Google Base initiative.

Data from comScore Media Metrix show that the number of Americans using online classifieds has shot up 80% in the past year, led by the rapid growth of the sites organized by Craigslist.org.

The Pew Internet Project found that:

• 30% of those with broadband internet access at home and work have sold something online
• 26% of Gen-Xers (29-40) have sold something online;
• 17% of Gen Y (18-28) have done so, as have 13% of internet users over 40
• 20% of online men and 14% of online women have sold something online
• 32 million American adults have used online classified ads for selling or buying
• 35 million American adults have ever participated in an online auction

The top five classified sites recorded by comScore Media Metrix in October 2005 were:

• Craigslist.org 8,236,000 unique visitors
• Trader Publishing Company 7,468,000 unique visitors
• Cars.com 4,298,000 unique visitors
• Apartments.com 1,555,000 unique visitors
• Abracat Property 924,000 unique visitors

Google posted on their help FAQ pages hints for a new service to be called “click-to-call”. “We’re testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.”

As the Financial Times commended, Click-to-Call “appears to be aimed at the many small businesses that cannot use Google’s existing online advertising service because they have no web presence of their own”. This will go in direct competition to the Pay Per Call service provided by Ingenio which are rumored to be courted by Yahoo. According to the Kelsey Group, which has vested interest in the growth of local search, linking web users to advertisers by means of a voice call, though still in its infancy, could become a market worth between $1.4bn and $4bn by 2009. Other possible competing services would the the one offered by eBay after their Skype purchase and AOL’s own version, to be linked through its AIM service.

The FT article goes further to quote the CMO of Ingenio in his comment that the Pey per Call approach warrants higher advertising fees because the service gives better chances for turning the call into a sale. According to Ingenio, the average price paid for a call by the 5,000 advertisers on their network is $9-$10.

Yahoo! launched a new version of its Shopping site bringing comparison tools to content and product search. In addition to its new Holiday Gift Center which officially kicks off the online holiday season, Yahoo! Shopping launched the so-called precision browsing concept — a combination of category browsing and keyword-based searching — which, Yahoo! claims, will bring better quality to product searching by narrowing results based on product attributes.

This announcement follows our recent call for optimizing e-commerce sites in time for an early holiday season, projected by eMarketer to reach $16.7 billion of online purchases.

NetImperative, the British e-marketing site, looks at the changes of Blogger, the blog subsidiary of Google and concludes that “Googles contextual ads may not be as useful as its search advertising, if the latest moves by the search giant are anything to go by.”

NetImperative refers to the recent move by Blogger to remove Google’s contextual ads appearing on the top of blogs hosted by its BlogSpot site, and to replace them with a regular Google search box.

According to Blogger which according to Nielsen//NetRatings had 4.4 million unique visitors in June alone, the Blogger navbar is a “more useful navigation tool” than the old Adwords ad block.

Not to be taken as the final word on a new and quickly changing dimension of web marketing, yet informative enough to address the most important questions about behavioral web targeting as known and practiced today, a new report published by eMarketer and titled “What Comes Before Search?” looks at how it works, what is its relationship with search engine marketing, and what are the challenges associated with making behavioral web targeting effective.