In a recent FastCompany piece by Gina Trapani titled “Work Smart: Claiming Your Name on the Web,” the author makes the following statement about creating one’s personal profile on the web, “To make yourself findable, claim your name in Web search results by setting up pages with information you’re comfortable sharing.”

The part about posting pages with “information you’re comfortable sharing” is key. The web today is a double edged razor sharp sword that advocates unlimited freedom of information and speech on one edge, while viciously cutting away basic freedoms when used as a highly monitored, mined, and scrutinized spying mechanism (as it is today) on the other.

Bottom line? Anything you post on the web is accessible to employers, colleagues, friends, family members, enemies, police, and other governmental and private agencies – without your approval or knowledge.

I recommend you consider all your online activity as essentially a strategic marketing initiative. Take care about sharing personal information on family and friends you wouldn’t want Hannibal Lecter to know (a bit dramatic maybe, but accurate). Take time to carefully consider precisely what you want to communicate. Write it down, review it a few times, then think about how you will communicate it. Will you blog daily, weekly, monthly? Will you setup and post to a Facebook page? Will you setup a LinkedIn profile? Will you Tweet some aspects of your life on Twitter? Whatever you choose, take the time to be strategic about it.

With more than 500 million users spending more than 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, the fact that the site is reported to readily comply with requests from national and private security organizations means you should take care with the information you share.

Just like in society where we have a class divide — The Have More’s, The Have’s, and the Have Not’s — there is a class divide in marketing between large enterprises and small to mid-size businesses.

Digital technology and the Internet have totally transformed every aspect of marketing from content creation to analytics. And, each marketing function has multiple skill sets required for effective implementation. This complexity is confronted and mastered with glaring success by large enterprises. But for mid-size and small businesses this complexity makes ROI virtually unattainable.

The real bad news for smaller enterprises is that they are offered limited tools that are sold as marketing solutions. The classic example is in the email marketing arena. Literally dozens of services offer “email marketing” that’s “easy-to-use.” But they tout their ability to tell their users who read their emails, or who clicked on a link as marketing. It’s not.

Every client I’ve ever worked with uses email marketing primarily to either entice a sale or promote attendance at an event. So I ask if they can tell who made a purchase or attended an event based on their email marketing I get the same pause for consideration, followed by a resigned “no” response.

The truth is that email marketing is very effective at enticing sales and promoting events, and you can measure the effectiveness including who actually takes the desired action. But it requires planning, proper configuration of email systems, and personal data collection to happen. These are the things not included in the monthly fee.

I look forward to the emergence of new offerings that fuse professional services with tools and technologies to enable the little guys to step up their marketing game.

A recent study by ForeSee Results shows that social media is a still maturing marketing medium, and that traditional marketing, including email marketing, are preferred.

According to the report, “social media interactions are a main influence for only 5 percent of visitors to retail websites” and “more traditional marketing tactics like promotional emails (19%), search engine results (8%), and Internet advertising (7%), influence more visits to retail websites.”

The report also concludes that traditional marketing techniques like promotional emails influence not only more traffic; they also deliver better-quality traffic. Some of the most satisfied site visitors arrived at a site because of previous familiarity with a brand, receipt of promotional emails, word-of-mouth, and visits to product review websites.

Only 8% of online shoppers said that’s social media was their preferred way to interact with a retailer. A majority want to engage with retailers, but but prefer to do so via email or on retail websites, rather than on social sites. Another key finding is that people are more satisfied with a retailers’ presence on Facebook than they are with Facebook itself.

Visit ForeSeeResults.com for more information or to download the full report.

It is telling to read the thoughts and opinions of MDC Chief Miles Nadal, Fast Company, and other media and industry “experts” on the exit of super creative Alex Bogusky. Specifically of note is the fact that none of these consumed minds appear remotely capable of seeing the real and obvious reason for Mr. Bogusky’s departure – MDC would not embrace the core values and integrity that Mr. Bogusky held, put forth in his work, and made his work unique and valuable. They catered to the fears of their clients, and their fears of losing them instead of asserting the awesome results they were delivering and using that as a platform for new directions. They would not change!

So, as with all of life’s expressions, Mr. Bogusky will move on and find a way. And you can bet MDC’s fortunes will quickly align with those of every other ad biz in these challenging times.

Integrity and a willingness to change, to do what has not been done, will always lead and prevail – though resistance may make the journey longer.

Engagement
A professional campaign includes the creation of specific web pages and triggered autoresponder emails that provide relevant and current information on the subject matter, as well as the producers, partners, and stakeholders. This is important, as it delivers a turn-key experience that effectively promotes the subject matter, the parties involved, and heightened recipient engagement (ie: registration for updates, RSVP to events, etc.).

Measurable Results
Professional email campaigns make detailed performance metrics accessible including read/open rates, link click rates, and conversion rates. They also create databases of qualified opt-in recipients interested in the subject matter and the offerings of producers, partners, and stakeholders.

Use of professional email marketing practices is often avoided based on three criteria, 1) time requirements, 2) skill requirements and 3) cost. These factors make using a ‘Send Only’ approach the most often used, and is enabled by services like Constant Contact and MailerMailer.

The ‘Send Only’ approach is used most often and is based on the agreement that simply getting a message or promotion viewed is sufficient. This approach fails to consider the impact of the recipients responses when they want more (information, capability, interaction, etc.), but can’t get it.

I hope this helps highlight the value-proposition to using professional email marketing practices as a core tool in your marketing and promotions initiatives. The time and resources required for professional campaign development are time and resources that are well spent.

Too many of the strategies and trends asserted and supported in marketing media are effective and relevant only for large enterprises. As an example the Forbes 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey found that Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. E-mail and e-newsletters was next with forty-six percent. For smaller marketers the leaders get flipped with e-mail being most effective. Published information and recommendations are generally skewed to favor strategy for large enterprises because they pay for most of the research and publications.

The bottom line is marketing is essentially a highly customized function. Customization is expensive, and a key factor that explains the difficulty small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) have implementing effective marketing initiatives that deliver measurable ROI.

Seventy-nine percent of marketers confirmed “the need to measure, analyze, and report marketing effectiveness” was greater in 2009 than in previous years according to a study by Lenskold Group and MarketSphere. SMB’s are wanting more than read and click rates to measure their marketing effectiveness by. Like any business, they want to know:
⁃    How successfully and efficiently am I reaching my customers?
⁃    Is my marketing converting sales?
⁃    Who are my Most Valuable Customers (MVC’s)?

There are a few basic tactics SMB’s can use to measure marketing ROI:
⁃    Use some form of database driven CRM system to track customer communications activity.
⁃    Consistently use email and web conversion pages.
⁃    Integrate and consistently implement conversion tracking processes into sales and service processes.

The careful integration and consistent implementation of online marketing with offline sales, service and support processes is what leads to happy customers. This must also include a healthy dose of “personalization” to be most effective. I’m not referring to some tactic here when I use the term personalization. I’m referring to a deeper more value based approach that begins by viewing each customer as a thoughtful, caring, and concerned real person. Don’t think of customers as simply consumers or markets. Thinking of people as consumers implies they have needs that you satisfy with your products and services, and that exchange represents the sum total of any satisfying experience they will have patronizing your business.

What I’m referring to when I use the term personalization is a focus on the qualitative and emotive qualities of your customers. I’m talking about things like sending a personalized “Thank You” note when someone visits or buys from you. Starting each customer interaction with a warm smile and a sincere greeting. These are the often overlooked things that make all the difference. And some of them can be automated with e-marketing systems to help you deliver that uber personal experience every time.

It’s good to pay attention to the trends and keep abreast of what’s happening in the marketing world. But it’s most important to focus on and invest in the solutions and services that can help you do what you do better. chances are those will be different from the tactics you read about – and that’s just fine.