Monthly Archives: January 2010
Social Matters
We’ve all seen the little link bars under blog posts and in forums asking people to Digg or Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. Do you need to try to get links in places where social networking can happen? Yes. Alone those links may not have a lot of value, but Google is increasingly looking at the “active Web” in determining site authority. Now why is this important? If your dealership website is constantly participating and being active in online communities wouldn’t you agree that your virtual dealership will have a higher site authority than your competitor who may not be as active?
Another fun fact, the average number of links a single person can have attached to them is 231. But think of how virally devastating it can be for your dealership if some mentions a bad experience in your store think of those links for that person, but then what about the 200 plus friends they have and the links attached to them?
Getting active in social media is time consuming, but participating in forums and social sites and getting blog owners to run your articles with your linked anchor text included can be worth your time. But remember, relevance is a basic rule in online marketing consulting. Also don’t coin yourself into just the top well known social sites, because keep in mind there over 100 social sites with over 1 million members. If that’s too overwhelming for you then you may need to do some social outsourcing.
Cheers,
Your Diva
And You Said Your Demographic Isn’t Online Shopping For Cars, HA!
It always would made me smile when an auto dealer who carries more of an older demographic brand says that their not targeting an internet shopper. Well what if that’s where more and more of them are shopping?
Baby boomers are avid Internet users. They make up 32.5% of the US adult population and 36% of the adult online population, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. On a typical day, boomers account for one-third of all Internet traffic, Pew found. According to Burst Media, nearly two-thirds (62.6%) of these users spent more than five hours a week online. Now how about that……
What You Can Learn From Consumer’s Digital Decade
This article was perfect moving into 2010, there is so much to take in from the beginning of the digital decade. So moving into the New Year decide how you’re going to engage your digital consumers, because there’s no smoke and mirrors on this one, this is just how it is!
What you can learn from consumers’ digital decade
by Josh Bernoff
As the decade I call the twenty-oh’s ends, think on what a transformational change we have just all witnessed. Our obsession with the latest product from Google or Apple often clouds our recognition of the long-term effects. We all know where we are. But I think many of us have forgotten where we were, and just how dramatically things have changed in ten short years.
Bill Gates in 2001 called this new decade “The Digital Decade.” Boy was he right.Consider:
- When the last decade began, there were 2.6 million broadband households in the US, one out of every 40 homes. Now there are 80 million, or two thirds of the population. Broadband has gone from rare to ubiquitous.
- Starting from zero, digital video recorders reached 31 million homes and HDTV reached 51 million in this decade. Together with online video and video on-demand, these gadgets have completely transformed the television experience.
- Mobile phones subscriptions are now 270 million, out of 307 million US adults.(For a comparison, mobile phones were in 51 million households at the start of the decade, but back then having more than one phone per household was unusual.) Back in 1999 phones were phones. Now they are iPhones, Blackberries, and Androids — computers and internet access devices.
- Portable digital music players have reached 76% of all US households. At the start of the decade, they were in practically none, because the iPod had yet to be introduced. Mark Mulligan calls it “The Decade That Music Forgot“.
And finally, it’s worth noting that Google just celebrated its tenth anniversary. In 1999, most of hadn’t heard of it yet. And forget social technologies — in 1999, most of the social activity online was in chat and discussion forums.
As I look back on all this from the perspective of media and marketing, it’s clear that consumer lead, media stumbles along behind, and marketers follow along behind.
2009’s consumers spend 34% of their media time online. As a result, digital marketing spending has gone from $6.2 billion in 1999 to $25.6 billion, or 12% of all marketing spending, in 2009. But marketers still spend most of their energy and dollars on television, newspapers, and radio.
Within those industries, the spend shifts slower than the behavior. Newspaper sites still bring in far less than ads in the paper. Video on-demand and online video ad models are still under construction.
But what you can learn from this decade is that consumers move quickly, models move slowly, and marketing moves conservatively. When you see a technology shifting, that’s the time to begin close observation of the models behind it. It will take years for those models to take hold, and in those years, you get the chance to learn. That’s when you need to experiment and figure out how things work, because that’s when it’s cheap and the competition is hanging back. The objective is not to make money right off, but to learn the ropes. Because when the transformation happens — and it will — then you will have the advantage of knowledge.
So if the Twenty-Oh’s was the Digital Decade for the Consumers then the Twenty-Teens is definitely the Digital Decade for the Marketers, so are you going to be the one to just sit back while your competition moves ahead of you and dominates your internet market? I just wouldn’t want to be “that guy” if you ask me!
Your Diva
The Digital Diva 