I recall sitting at a meeting a few years back. It was a one-on-one conversation in regards to an online service we were providing for a major website. In this conversation that occurred over coffee cups and cans of Slice, I went on a rant about how the site was no longer fun and how we were only doing the same things over and over. He sat there across from me, arms-crossed with a stare toward the corner of the room just silently listening. I could see from the form of his forehead chasing the corner of the room with an aimless stare that he was labeling my insight useless.  I shook my head, sitting up on the table and staring at the afternoon sun began it’s descent and said, “Why are people even on the site anyway?” Of course, looking around the office, the pay we received, and the fact that our product was noticeable and recognized not to mention a reliable service tailored for it’s demographic, and we were awesome with SEO services, the answer was present for us. But was it?

I told him the writing on the site was sufficient in terms of content, but the writing we were promoting, pushing, and politicing between the ranks were garbage. I felt the writers served a purpose in providing “expert” opinions, but the opinions were so predictable. I could click on the daily post of the day and already know what I’m going to see, think, feel and react before the page even loaded on my browser. And maybe I was burned out from it all and maybe the issue was me. I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him, “Why did the internet become boring?” I was a lost soul with my focus shifting and wasting toward the Facebook news feeds watching other’s lives pass me by status-by-status. And amidst the frustration came the observation I made: “These people who frequent the site, check in everyday only do so out of interest. Dude, the internet owes us nothing.” I asked him, why do people log-in and participate? Why do people pay for additional services? Why is there recurring traffic? Why do they write us with concerns ranging from the legitimate to the downright annoying? And why do they choose us over the competition? Advertising only tells people what to do, and the people either listen or they don’t. In the end visitors and valued customers only act in free will. And the people were on the site for one reason: it was fun. The rest of the conversation didn’t go well. He told me I was making no sense. And I was relegated back into doing the same tasks and saying the same things over and over again.

The internet is what you make it. It’s expanded upon the way we exist and operate. Whether you call it fun or not is irrelevant. Just remember that the worst thing you can do is take what you do online so seriously that you cannot see changes when they need to happen. If you do the same thing over and over, which was just about the same thing everyone else was doing before you, you’re going to get the same reaction as everyone else if you’re lucky. And believe me the reaction is going to stand out less and less and less. When it comes to things like search engine marketing and seo services in general, originality is the greatest means of optimization. Granted keyword analytics, Google traffic analysis, and uncovering search-term competitiveness on a word-by-word basis can do wonders for you.  But if you have nothing new to offer, your service is going to get old fast.

As a writer, I go by this rule of thumb: if it’s work for me to write it, it’s going to be even more work for those who read it. Case in point if you one day take a look at all your content and a voice in your head asks “That’s it?” Chances are a lot of people are going to ask the same thing. If you see something of yours that makes you want to hit the back button out of confusion, failure to provide a clear message, or because the site just seems boring. The back button on the browser is going to see alot more action than anything on your site.

Re-inventing The Wheel Isn’t Neccessary, But it Almost Always Helps. Sometimes it can be fun, even.

Why did Rolling Stone name Jimi Hendrix the best guitarist of all time? Was it the album sales? Eric Clapton’s appreciation for him? The big hair and undistinguishable charcoal blues-beratone roaring through the riffs? While all that certainly contributes, his legacy can also be attributed by his devil-may-care composition style that unleashed chords guitarists and guitar teachers at the time considered “unfit” for guitar play, through the disgusted faces made by the conservative Americans of the time seeing him shred the national anthem at Woodstock, and that sense of fashion that to this day lacks definition. Why did he cover an ordinary Bob Dylan acoustic-and-harmonica song and make it one of his best songs, “All Along The Watchtower”? Was it someone in the music industry telling him it would get a few spins at the clubs? Did his search engine optimization consultant do some market research on search terms and keywords and decide that doing so would up his page rank? No.

He only wanted to show people what the guitar could be. Just as Jim Morrison wanted to show what wordplay and poetic lyricism could mean to music and counter-culture in general. The innovators of rock and all great music didn’t establish themselves on industry standards of the norm of what was breaking norms, rather they did what they loved to do and made themselves a part of it by making it theirs.

When it comes to search engine marketing and SEO services, the focus shouldn’t be on what the site or service is, but rather what it could be. The best way to promote anything isn’t through just keyword analysis, market research, backlink traffic and demographic appeal. The best promotions don’t make explanations. They make promises.

Months pass and so did wrestling legend and 1980′s pop icon Macho Man Randy Savage. I spent that weekend watching a Best Of DVD that WWE had released the year previous. And while there were some epic encounters against the likes of Hulk Hogan, Ricky Steamboat, Ric Flair, and Sting, the one that stood out the most to be was his very first match. He could’ve copied and pasted himself on the canvas based on what worked before him. While it would’ve worked in playing his part and servicing the show, it wouldn’t have stood out. Winning or losing didn’t matter. He was debuting before the Madison Square Garden crowd, one of the toughest crowds to deal with besides being Santa Claus or an injured-Michael Irvin at an Eagles game (I know our SEO Company in Philadelphia friends aren’t going to like me saying that, but whatever, it’s not my fault your extremely talented team is suffering  from a losing record in a division full of underachieving teams), his goal was to get hated as quicky and loudly as possible from the moment his leg enter the ring through the middle rope to the moment he jumped off the top rope with an elbow. And it worked to perfection. What he sold to that crowd through his balance of arrogance and cowardice, his purple-gaudy robe with matching headband, and the three indistinguishable stars with the title “MACHO MAN” across the rear of his tights was a product perfected in both package and purpose. He didn’t sell them anything, instead it was the crowd buying into it. The force was strong in this one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Macho Man became just as much a part of the 80′s as Care Bears, Flux Capacitors and Member’s Only jackets. From his raspy-voice that could snap a slim jim at a second’s notice. Not with what he said or through any special stunts or gimmicks a lot of people swear by. He achieved greatness through the absolute-100% feeling of justification he brought through every action he took. Every elbow off the top rope and every over-the-top action committed he did with pride.

With the shifting of methods and algorithms affecting today’s search engine marketing tactics, pages that are just there to be there with duplicate content for the sake of providing back links are not only uninteresting, but also unbecoming with Google rankings. In fact, you may accomplish more with a 404 message.

You can manipulate the system to keep doing the same methods but duplicate content is about as dull as replacing the lead singer of your awesome and amazing 80′s rock band with Gary Cherone and committing the sin of calling it Van Halen, or that “Chinese Democracy” album with a band that tried to pass as Guns and Roses though Axel Rose kicked out everyone from the November-Rain-Sweet-Child-Of-Mine-Welcoming-to-the-Jungle glory days. It can be as depressing as replacing your favorite television character and passing the show off with the same name like watching The Three Stooges with Shemp instead of Curly, or any Pink Panther cartoon that features the Panther talking, watching The Dukes of Hazzard with Coy and Vance instead of Luke and Bo, those awkward Saved By The Bell episodes where Kelly and Jessie got replaced with a motorcycle chick named Tori,those even worse Saved By The Bell episodes where the cast went to college, or the episodes of The X-Files with the boring villain from Terminator 2 replacing David Duchovny.

The audience can see and smell it from almost a mile away. And they’ll scoff at anything blatantly-derived attempting to pass itself as original and unique. And Google is beginning to take notice itself. There is no difference between the channel change button on a remote and the back button on the browser.  You’ll find your business go the same direction that Welcome Back Kotter and Grease 2 went without John Travolta.

At a certain point, you have to set aside industry standards. In terms of search engine marketing just as important as knowing what they want, you have to know what you want. And if your definition bores you, your product is only going to get boring. An SEO company and SEO services in general can work wonders in directing views and sharpening your message toward better accessibility, but once they’re in your audience you only have a few seconds or so to deliver and engage the customer toward your business. A great internet site doesn’t just fulfill a service, trend on twitter once in a while or manipulate black hat search engine marketing tactics to get on top. It may take them long to get on top, but when they do they stay there. Not for showing the internet who they are and what they do, but by showing who they can be.

The best page rank is the one within.

The talk about how Google works is only set to thicken. More than a search service, Google has become a cultural phenomenon. It’s in our phones scanning bar codes at stores for price comparisons, in our GPS devices as they tell us where to turn, in our mustaches for the month of November to help combat Prostate Cancer and in our ears with an almost infinite collective of videos featuring Lady Gaga and Adele covers. Even if you don’t have a smart phone, or need a GPS to get where you need to be, already have a face full of fur regardless of what time of the year, and if–like me– you’re not a fan of mainstream music and know Adele is a great singer who has more than just two songs. On either extreme Google is everywhere.

Google and Bing don’t seek to be search engines, but solutions. A service for which you can find what you seek with a few taps of a touchscreen. How it works and operates remains a mystery (not for the few SEO ninjas, however)–one that may remain hidden from generation-to-generation along the ranks of Coca-Cola’s formula and the specific selection of herbs and spices that an old man in a gas station who was to become an honorary colonel during the 1930′s prepared his chicken with.  Google is going to have their conspiracy theories that will pass from generation-to-generation bearing a mysticism both avant-garde and orwellian in nature.

Over the past few months websites have seen dramatic changes in views, search ranks, incoming traffic and in some cases overall business. This is because since February of this year, Google has unleashed the Panda. The Panda Update has been a system brand new algorithms designed to make search results more human. In the aftermath of the constant changes, including a radical changes in keyword referral data, some sites are getting slapped around in ways that have SEO Experts shaking their heads wishing we could all go back to the easy days of Excite and Netscape.

So do you throw out the playbook? Fire the coach? Lose every remaining game of the season to get the first pick of the draft and take Andrew Luck? Hold out on the team due to disappointment with your contract, miss games due to strep throat and use the cover of Madden as an excuse? Deem the system unprofitable and lockout all players until a new collective bargaining agreement can be attained for guaranteed business? Quit in the 4th Quarter of Game 6?

No. The solution is simple. Run the offense but keep it honest. Call some audibles if you have to. Understand the purpose of the Panda Update is to further empower Google toward slapping away spam. This isn’t the old internet anymore. Just copying and pasting content over and over to create back links is about as outdated as using IRC chat as your primary means of online communication. Spam is pollution. Like the famous Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch that popularized it, it’s fun at first but like anything Monty Python it eventually gets boring, annoying and makes you consider cancelling your Netflix account.  At best it only gets accidental visits from users making a “wrong turn” with their search and stumbling on your site. It’s bad for business and will only serve to build your bounce rate. We’ve all dealt with it from the fictitious male enlargement medicines to the emails claiming to be from a royal family in Africa stuck in a desperate situation and in need of a wire-transfer of your money or your Paypal password to get home.

So Matt Cutts, Google’s very own Captain Planet of Spam–who unfortunately doesn’t show up saying “With your powers combined…” when you search “Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart!”– implemented a new algorithm that values human interaction toward the site above all else. If your site or service contains quality and original content with growing trends of organic popularity with your blogging and social media presence. The Panda advises that keep the ball rolling. And if not, here’s a few pointers to help you step up your game.

QUALITY CONTENT IS KING. I can’t stress that enough. In fact I’ll say it again in bold. QUALITY CONTENT IS KING. It’s what will first-and-foremost make you stand out. Great content is Hulk-Hogan’s 24-inch pythons tearing apart the bright yellow shirt upon entering the ring and slamming Andre The Giant. SEO Tactics are the backstage interview with the Mean Gene Okerlunds and the promotional stuff Vince McMahon does to sell the tickets and pay-per-views.

Examine what you have above the fold of your page. Think like a newspaper. Is there something that will engage the visitor within 5 seconds of when their eyes and your content meet? This will affect the bounce rate big time and keep the potential customer or fan as far as possible from hitting the back button. Is there a heavy template footprint, with pay-per-click ads taking up too space giving visitors the impression that the site is helping you but not helping them? If so, Google is going to be a sad panda. Literally.

Does your site have any empty pages which just serve to link a bunch of unnecessary nonsense? Is the content empty with a ridiculous ad-ratio? Does the visitor of the site get more information regarding acai berry colon cleanses rather than what they actually want? While it may help you with Adsense, it’s not going to please the panda.

The more machine your site seems, the worse. And if the spelling and grammar just isn’ t there, neither will your site be on Google. Google has better means of checking diction, syntax, and how much of a duplicate the content of the site is. So stop with the copying and pasting. Ctrl + V only makes for sad pandas.

Google is only implementing changes to make the internet more human and make sure that what you seek is matched with the site that best serves it’s needs. Make sure you provide quality content on the landing page above the fold and that your site allows for more human interactivity and you’ve paved the road for better ratings, better ranking, and most importantly a better experience whether you’re just trying to get more business or trying to get your Born This Way cover the most views possible.

 

E-books have been taking over the reading market by storm – especially the Kindle, iPad, and Nook. These online reading platforms allow one to purchase and read books on a thin device equipped with a large viewing pane. These devices surged in market share recently, with 180 digital books purchased for every 100 printed books, according to Amazon. Amazon has been the leader in the e-Book market with their popular Kindle, pulling 67% of the U.S. market share with the Nook following at a mere 22%. Furthermore, Amazon generates 57% of the e-Book sales followed by Barnes & Nobles’s 27%, Apple’s 9%, and Borders’ 7%, (statistics by Goldman Sachs)

What about the future of printed books? Will reading your favorite novel or magazine be the same in the next 5 or 10 years? There are pros and cons to reading online – the question is whether or not the pros weigh strongly enough to convince consumers to switch from printed books to e-Books. The pros of e-Books and e-Book readers are clear: the number of books you can hold in this device. By Amazon’s calculations, the 1.4 GB of storage available can hold approximately 1500 non-illustrated books. Given the sheer number of books that can be stored on the device, it makes sense to remove all of the books cluttering the house and instead have them all on one, convenient and easy to access device. Furthermore, this makes finding the books one loves easier because those special books are all in one location.

Another convenience of the Kindle is its text enhancement ability. Especially for older people, sometimes reading the small print in many books becomes quite cumbersome because a) the text is small to the point it hurts the eyes and, b) using an external reading enhancer such as a magnifying glass becomes too unwieldy. These devices counter this common problem by allowing readers to enlarge the text with the push of a button. With a built-in backlight, reading lights or smaller reading lamps will become obsolete if e-Book readers take off.

Streamlining the book reading process can attract some readers into switching, but there are still some problems with e-Book readers. The switching costs from a written to digital book are still fairly high – a recent online poll conducted through squidoo.com revealed that 71.4% don’t have, nor do they intend to purchase an e-reader given the current models offered. Despite this poll, given the current progress Amazon is making in digital books sales, it may not be too far off that printed books are a thing of the past.

Between the times of video chats and email was IM, or instant messaging. Whereas email is a more deliberate service, in reality more akin to sending someone a letter or note, an instant message is more like a chat. To IM someone is to start up a conversation with someone you know, or by entering a public chatroom to meet new people online.

Like with any online service, there are multiple providers, but the first provider to really take off was AIM or AOL Instant Messenger. Although AOL had greatly declined as an internet service provider, AIM continued to be a popular IM source for people looking to stay connected online. However, now there is more competition from services such as Facebook, Gmail and Skype. The question of which instant messenger is superior is sure to come up.

The answer here is that each service offers its own unique feel, benefits, and drawbacks to the table. Each of these three services has integrated video chatting into its software, so neither of the three wins in that respect. In terms of which one has the clearer audio or video feed is strictly speculation, but Skype has used the video chat system for more time than its competitors, so it may have a slight advantage.

The big question here is which service is used the most often by people, making it the more convenient and therefore most utilized IM software on the market? With college students, the more utilized application will probably be Facebook, but other internet users, Google Chat may come out on top given the sheer amount of people who open up the page to send emails and leave the page.

The real winner though, is the frequently underrated Microsoft Corporation.

• Microsoft already held 40.67% of Instant Messenger shares worldwide as of June 2011, according to OPSWAT, a software management solutions company. With MSN Messenger, Microsoft had about 330 million active users in June 2009.
• In May 2011, Microsoft bought out Skype, the 2^nd largest IM service with 27.39% market share. The combined force gives Microsoft a leading majority of 68.06% of the IM market.
• The final factor to consider is that Facebook’s chat service is actually provided via Microsoft’s service simply called Messenger. There is a total of 500-600 million Facebook and Gmail users, but it’s currently unclear which company holds the majority.

Essentially, we can safely say that Microsoft is the real winner in the market share breakdown. However, only time will tell which IM service will offer the most services and convenience to its users.

 

 

iContact is just one of the many e-mail autoresponders available for e-Marketers. This service is vital to any company because it does work. An autoresponder is an internet service that allows one to send multiple emails, or automatically respond to emails. Auto response saves time, money, and actually makes money for virtually any company that uses it. Even with only a 1% subscriber-to-buyer conversion rate from utilizing an email autoresponder, online marketers love this service because of the very idea of online marketing campaigns: it’s 0 cost to the sender, so the worst you could possibly do by sending an email about a product is breaking even.

Of course this view is a bit overly optimistic, but not by a large margin. Time is a limited resource, and so wasted time is wasted money (aka opportunity cost.) Furthermore, autoresponding services like iContact do charge a nominal fee for the use of their services. However, even if no one responds to these emails (which is unlikely), autoresponding is essential to maintain awareness and a relationship with prospective buyers. Once you have turned a website visitor into an email responder, you can maintain a relationship with them with higher communication. The chances of subscribers buying your products increase exponentially when compared to visitors. Of course, the practicality of communicating and having a personal email relationship with every visitor to a website is virtually impossible: how do you maintain personal communication with a thousand, ten thousand, a million subscribers?

Here enters autoresponding email services. These services handle this flood of subscribers very tactfully and efficiently: with information provided on the website, it appropriately segments a buyer and sends him/her a “personalized” email followed by 2 or 3 follow up emails in the following weeks. Furthermore, it’s not too much of a stretch to assume the computers can send appropriate response emails given the nature of the email. The reason this is so effective is because statistically speaking, repeated exposure to a product greatly increases the chances of a prospect buying said product, so there’s good reason to send updated news and specs on a product over and over again. Airlines have this down to an almost science: depending on where you travel and what class you travel in, airlines will send you updated coupon and flight information details tailored to you. For any online marketer, there’s no reason to not look into this option. There’s not much cost involved, but it can yield high profits.

We were pushing the release of one of our integration projects DiscountDoc.com until we realized that something was seriously flawed – it really wasnt clear on what the site was. Once we added a video spokesperson ( I know, so 3 years ago) the conversion went from 1.5% on lead submits to 3.7%.  Not bad for a $100 investment.  Point is, sometimes all you need is that little push over the edge to get your message across — in this case, “Hey all it takes for a Nose Job is $800!”

In May 2011, Microsoft Corporation bought Skype, the online telecommunications company, for an unprecedented $8.5 billion, beating out competitors Facebook and Google. For those unfamiliar with Skype, it is an online company solely devoted to connecting millions of people throughout the world, giving them online talk and video capabilities, and as a paid service, calling capabilities to land lines or cell phones locally or internationally. While not implicit in the name, Skype is by far one of the most trusted and most utilized online telecommunications tools, and arguably one of the most utilized tools on the internet. In 2010, Skype boasted modest figures of over 170 million active users, as well as 207 billion minutes of voice and video communication utilizing this service. However, despite these impressive numbers, Skype still has issues in leading users to utilize its paid service, the pennies-per-minute for calls to national or international lines. Thus raises the fundamental question of whether the acquisition of Skype was a smart step in the right direction for Microsoft, or a rather costly investment that never pans out.

Microsoft remains hopeful on the situation. CEO Steve Ballmer stated that both Microsoft and Skype were right for each other because both are communications companies, that communications technologies have been “the backbone” for the corporation, and is impressed with Skype’s boasted revenues of $860 million in the 2010 financial year. Furthermore, Microsoft offers many products apt to be outfitted with the Skype’s communications technology, including (but not limited to), the Xbox video game console, Microsoft Office software, Microsoft hotmail, and the Microsoft smart phone software. It appears that Microsoft can put Skype to a lot of good use, given that it can find a way to make up for the $8.5 billion price tag it paid for the company. In terms of marketing, Microsoft has big plans for the smart phone sector, seeing as Microsoft-cased phones contributed a mere 7.5% to the market last quarter and the company is in dire need to find a way to compete with iPhones and Google-based smart phones.

The downside to the purchase is the purchase itself: a hefty $8.5 billion price tag is certainly not small change to any degree of the imagination. The real challenge to Microsoft will be in finding ways they can attract or generate more revenue from a company that was down $7 million from last year in revenues. It may not be difficult to find ways to use Skype, but the question is will these new ways justify higher prices for a larger profit margin? How can Microsoft justify an $8.5 billion purchase, when market analysts say that Skype was only worth $4 billion – an overpayment of 212.5%? Microsoft could try to cover some of the costs with ads, but that will only hurt them in the long run: one of Skype’s pulling attributes was that it wasn’t ad-laden, a refreshing break from other free services. Only time will tell if Microsoft made the right move.

 

Put your company in the “Lime Light”: Successfully integrating CRM into your marketing strategy

SEO Brand is one of the authorized integrators of leading CRM service Lime Light CRM, and their services have been vital to our company. Many companies face challenges, however, when trying to integrate CRM into their marketing strategy.

If there’s one thing any marketer has ever learned, it’s this: standing out from competition is a chore. You know you have to do it, but it’s no light task and you’re busy. You don’t have the time to learn entirely new and foreign software, but most CRM software available on the market does not have a user-friendly interface. Focusing on customer relationship management is a great way to building real connections with your clients, but successfully integrating a good, easy-to-understand CRM system to help your company seems close to impossible. This has never been an issue with Lime Light CRM since integration, as it is entirely web-based and the support is truly helpful and knowledgeable.

Another problem is simply that the CRM and the company’s objectives do not match, and integration soon becomes disintegration of a key marketing tactic. In many instances, companies feel that they need to integrate with some type of CRM, which results in a less-than-optimal ending. There are many CRM services available, and oftentimes the company’s focuses just do not match with what the service has to offer. It works the best when it is aligned to your company’s specific goals and needs, and one great aspect of Lime Light CRM is that they offer customized counseling and coaching service as well. Lime Light CRM not only provides assistance in how to navigate their web-based service, but ensures successful and actual integration with your company’s unique goals.

CRM should also change and adapt as your company changes, while keeping it functional and simple enough for marketers to fully utilize what it has to offer. Lime Light CRM invests their time and energy to regularly partner with many diverse third party providers, to bring the best product to its clients. The third party providers offer integrated services such as reputation management, risk management, membership site assistance, payment processing, and other related and relevant services, all which are very crucial to any company.

It’s easy to list the potential benefits of utilizing CRM, but it takes acknowledgement from both sides that the company goals must integrate properly with the right CRM service. Every company wants to be in the limelight, but it’s a tough world out there. Integration with Lime Light CRM may or may not happen – but if it does, you will have yourself a surefire CRM partner.

 

Is Twitter finally making money for its users?  The social networking site, founded in 2006 around the beginning of the social networking hype, seems to have been a little slower on the uptake of tailoring their site towards money making endeavors.  But they finally seem to be offering businesses, and another interesting group of individuals, the opportunity to make some cash.

Twitter (originally name Twttr) was created based on the idea of an SMS (short messaging service) site which limits the number of words to 140, creating a world of short status updates for people to share with their friends and others.  But Twitter’s latest plan seems to involve tailoring its applications to make the site more business friendly.

In 2009, Time magazine predicted the 10 aspects of Twitter that had money making potential.  Numbers one and two: Allow for targeted marketing at an extremely low cost; and make measuring return on investment in advertising much easier than ever before.

Two years later, Twitter has seems to have lived up to its money making potential with the acquisition of Backtype in early July of 2011.  Backtype is a data analytics firm which will allow measurement of how Tweets travel through the network and who reads them.  Why is this beneficial for business; or anyone else for that matter?

For starters, Twitter provides a large and varied user base.  Just a year after it went public in 2006 Twitter had obtained about 50,000 active weekly users.  In 2011, that number had climbed to a startling 200 million, higher than MySpace, and about a third of the number of Facebook users. A recent study in the UK showed that even 8% of grandparents were using Twitter.

These numbers are appealing to politicians too.  With a national election right around the corner, many politicians are hoping to rake in some extra campaign cash the untraditional way: via Twitter.  Talkative VP Joe Biden sent his first Tweet on the 4^th of July, and President Obama took questions from Twitter in a town-hall-style address to the nation.  Like most other politicians involved, the staff is in charge of all Tweets, but the hope remains the same: that Twitter will become an effective money making tool even when times are tough. Backtype will certainly help us see whether Twitter can provide a worthy return on the investment for businesses, politicians, or anyone else.

These days, it seems like everyone is always talking with someone else through some sort of machine. Care to guess how? If you had guessed “checking e-mail,” you may actually be wrong. E-mail’s impact has seen an unfortunate decline as e-mail alternatives dominate the competition. Earlier this year, comScore released information that shows that web-based e-mail usage and engagement fell for nearly all age groups. The sharpest downturn was among teenagers 13-17, with a 53% drop in total pages viewed. Overall, people spent 28% less time looking at e-mail when they were on the internet.

Instead of e-mail, they may be sending text messages. The so-called alternatives to e-mail include texting and social networking, which have both skyrocketed in the past several years. Text usage grew from 2009 to 2010 in all age groups, according to The Nielsen Company. Amazingly, in mid-2010 teens sent an average of 3,339 texts each month. Alternatively, if not texting they are probably updating their Facebook profile or following their favorite people in Twitter. Social networking claimed 43% more time on the Internet in the same period of time.

There does seem to be a gleaming silver lining, though. ComScore reported in the same press release that the percentage of people checking e-mail on mobile phones grew 36-40% from 2009 to 2010 (okay, you may be right after all). Even among teens 13-17, notorious for texting 24/7, the numbers increased from 30% checking e-mail on their mobile devices to 38%.

What does this all mean?

The likely story is that people are away from their computers more frequently, so they depend on their phones for the latest news and communication. E-mail does have many other alternatives, which will be key players in reaching out to potential and current customers. The younger the customers, the more texts they generally send and receive. More and more Americans are joining some sort of social networking site each day, and there is so much potential there.

However, you still can’t forget that these alternative methods, at this point, just cannot do what e-mail can do – send a block of text, images, and site links to thousands and millions of people at once. Although people may no longer check e-mail as often on their computers, mobile e-mail is still very prevalent and will continue to grow as a major form of communication. Some e-mail campaigns already have alternative layouts for mobile phones. Formatting your e-mail campaigns to be mobile-friendly may be a useful tactic if many of your customers have switched from the stationary screen to the portable screen.

Or maybe you can just take the time to text your buddies instead – everyone else seems to be doing it.

← Older posts

Newer posts →