The global trend towards digital socialization is around the corner and will make quite an impact on digital culture in 2010.

In 2009, we saw data portability (more simply described as logging onto “other” sites with your “Faebook” login.  We also saw people begin to understand what Twitter is good for.

We’re in a time now when countries such as India and China are quickly getting on board with social media.  Facebook’s explosive growth in the last few years was driven largely by non-US members.

What this means is that an unprecedented opportunity to globally extend communities is arriving.

The challenge will be bridging offline cultural gaps online, and the businesses that can enable this osmosis to the benefit of their brand will be the largest winners.

Another powerful social media trend will be around eReaders.  We are about to see an explosion in the adoption of eReaders that might very well outpace the iPod’s.  And as people replace their source of information from paper to digital, the advantages of digital will arrive as well.  There will be eReader apps, communities, and networks swirling around our sources of information in ways we have never seen.

And with game-changing changes in social media, we will also see businesses struggle to keep their social media policies up to date, flexible, yet risk-adverse.  As the global communities extend further, and digital reading begins quickly burning paper, the potential upside and downside will be a challenge for businesses to navigate.

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With so much excitement about the iPhone amongst both consumers and consumers, and the vertical market share growth charted by the device (from 5 to 10% between 2008 and 2009), it’s puzzling to see a recent Gartner Inc. report predict that Google’s Android, currently at 2% market share, will leapfrog to 14.5% by 2012, making it the second-largest mobile platform at the great expense of the iPhone’s market share.

The Gartner report predicts that the iPhone’s growth will become stagnant, growing a few points to a whopping 12% by 2012. Why such a slow-down for the iPhone? And what does this mean for marketers who are just now catching onto the surge of client interest and investment?

Most of the projected growth is attributed to Google’s own ability and efforts to promote the Android, as well as its own apps and the large number of manufacturers making the open source device, which will make it a cheaper option than the iPhone. Additionally, the iPhone, not being open source, has limitations, whereas an open platform allows developers to implement functionality the platform provider haven’t gotten around to yet, are not good at, or simply put: other people could do it better

What should marketers be doing?
• Follow Android’s market share growth and start talking to your clients or in-house teams about the emergence of Android so they are comfortable with the change if and when it happens
• Study the mobile apps already on Android, and what your competitors are doing on the platform
• Get your technical teams up to speed on Android by downloading the SDK:
http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html
• Create your demo project long before anyone else does!

The open source  world has a lot to do with where I am now.  The first company I started was running on a shoe-string budget out of my band’s rehearsal space.  That was 11 years ago, and since then I have grown a fond admiration for open source developers, products, and the collective movement that is wide open to that one great idea someone might have.

That person can build their idea into the conjucation and contribute to the product’s evolution.

I wish The Onion were that way, but sadly, they have an odd closed door policy of no article submissions from writers.

While The Onion is consistently good, I believe it could be consistently great if it were to allow a piece to be submitted from that lone person who just had a great idea at 3 AM.

Even The New Yorker, with their stolid, intellectually elite, cultural epicenter perspective allows contributions.

About once a week something happens to me that could make for a good, perhaps great depending on the writing, Onion article.  I think of The Onion because this type of humor is on my mind.  When my parents go shopping, my father follows my mother around as though she’s his seeing eye dog, becoming increasingly bored and fidgety until he drifts into a dream-state.

That’s when you see him by the make-up counter in Macy’s practicing his golf swing.  The man thinks of golf, and his mind goes there instinctually.

My mind goes to the ironic, crass humor that The Onion has baked into their DNA.

Today an email slipped through our company’s spam filter, spoofed as an authentic Pfizer email regarding Viagra.  The first thing I thought of was, “I wonder how Pfizer’s spam filter deals with the billions of emails about Viagra?”

Is checking the junk folder a regular part of a Pfizer’s employees’ day?  How do they know whether the incoming email from Helen Moore at a hotmail address with Viagra keywords is spam or a woman concerned that her husband has had an erection for 8 hours?

I can imagine an Onion article title:

Pfizer IT Finds 2,987,548 Customer Service Emails in Spam Filter

We’ve all heard about the many cost-cutting measures companies are taking to survive in what I call “The Post-Bush Economy”.

One measure we haven’t heard enough about is analytics tuning.

We hear about budgets being re-allocated or slashed. Traditional is moving online, viral and buzz are being questioned, RFP’s are going out in hopes of finding less expensive vendors, and so on.

But can an organization truly optimize its channels if it hasn’t made the most of its web analytics data?

As our analytics guru Micah Fisher-Kirshner said in a recent newsletter, “Ironically, most of the large companies we have worked with have such nascent analytics practices that their requirements barely scratch the surface of even GA’s capabilities.”

This leads to the question: how can a company know what to cut, and by how much, unless they have a highly optimized analytics practice?

The first step in budget re-allocationis investing in the enhancement of your analytics practice.

If you are reading this and thinking that your analytics practice is probably not what it should be, contact us, we’ll give you an “analytics check-up” that will ensure your organization can make wise budget decisions to survive in the Post-Bush economy.

This will be an interesting year for paid search.

Last year there was about $10B spent in paid - this year could be as much as $12B.

You don’t hear as much talk about viral and buzz campaigns.  Too risky?

I began doing SEO in late 1999.  It took me about 18 months to really get the hang of it, as back then there was very little information on SEO.

I was solely responsible for the marketing of my small company (eight people).

The economic collapse hit in 2001, just as the great revenue gains I was generating were kicking in.  And as the economy got worse, my SEO achievements accelerated.  I built many different websites so that each of the four salesmen could operate their own brand.  By doing so, the company would have not just a number one rank for our keywords, but often four.

Our revenue grew and grew, seemingly immune from the economic downturn.  As the overall market decreased for our industry, our market share increased faster.

An article in today’s NY Times describes a merchant who is doing the same, but with paid search.

The merchant has increased  his revenue by doubling his conversion rate, his bid, and his marketing budget.

Think of all the companies out there spending significant amounts on brand campaigns, yet are budget constrained in paid search.

The right move for these marketers is to drastically cut, or eliminate, their under performing non-search campaigns and maximizing their investments in search.

American marketing agencies are soon going to find out that no matter how good their campaigns are, how many tests they do, or how much money they spend, a surprisingly high number of their performance driven campaigns in China are going to fail.

Why?

There is a lot of talk about China’s economic growth.  American companies are excited to have a Chinese presence.  But the truth is so many companies want to be there but don’t really know why.  There is a sense that something is about to erupt, and not being there equates to missing out.

But is China really that promising?  Sure, China has had double digit growth for years.  But it wasn’t the Chinese who were consuming.  So, before American companies rush over there to sell the Chinese products and services that were selling well elsewhere, let’s stop for a moment to recognize that the Chinese are not a consumer culture.

Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, called Americans, “the most over-extended consumer in world history.” And now that Americans are no longer buying so many Chinese exports, China will have to find another consumer base for its enormous production machine. And they know it won’t come from within.

As Thomas Friedman wrote:
“China has no real Social Security, health insurance or unemployment insurance. Without that social safety net, it’s hard to see how Chinese don’t end up saving most of their stimulus.”

In the SEM agency world, having a presence in China is important to prospective clients.  This presence represents the gateway to a huge, seemingly untapped market.

The problem, however, is that these agencys’ clients are going to realize that the Chinese will require, according to Fred Hu, chairman for Greater China for Goldman Sachs, a huge “cultural and structural” shift before they start consuming the largely unnecessary products that Americans love.

China will prove to be the largest market, but so frugal that some marketers will realize that it isn’t worth trying.  For example, Adobe Systems essentially ignores the market, recognize that pirating is out of control there, the Chinese government is not helping police the piracy, and that the Chinese consumer doesn’t have the money or mindset to pay for the software.

A wave of companies are about to discover what Adobe knew ten years ago.  China is more stingy than it is large.

I just managed a project to use WordPress as a CMS for an SEO campaign.

WP is getting a lot of attention for its ability to be a flexible CMS.  With nearly a half million plug-ins, it has the largest open source development community of any CMS.  Ironically, it was not meant to be a CMS.

But the development work done by the WP community has given WP the ability to function as a CMS.  When I spoke at OMMA in NYC last year, a fellow panelist was asked for a recommendation on an affordable SEO-friendly CMS.  He answered “WordPress” and I was thinking, “amen!”.

Out of the box, WP is very SEO friendly.  When we piloted our first enterprise launch of WP as a CMS, we encountered many obstacles, such as writing custom title tags and URL handling.  But every problem had a plug-in that was not only free, but very easy to install.

Our front end developer spent about 4 days converting PSD files into WordPress friendly CSS templates.  Once the templates were made, publishing pages was very easy because ANYONE CAN DO IT.

The success of WP has a lot to do with ease of use.  So you can give each business unit or manager their own section and just let them build out their pages when the templates are up.  (Afterwards, have a designer sweep through to make it look professional).

I’ve worked with a number of enterprises, from Adobe, Hearst, Sony, Warner Brothers, and American Express, and a number of small and mid-size companies.

WordPress can, but is very unlikely, to serve the needs to larger companies that need complex publishing rights and version control.  One can, however, recreate this functionality from plug-ins and your own custom scripts. (Note: creating plug-ins for WP is very easy, the code is clean with descriptive inline comments).

But let’s face it, WP is not meant to be an enterprise CMS.  Ford has used WordPress for a microsite, but we have yet to see WP used for websites that have a lot of stakeholders.

As marketers within large companies recognize the inertia they face creating an online presence for business-unit campaigns utilizing centralized resources, they look for inexpensive and easy publishing solutions.  Wordpress is filling that need, and I am excited to contribute as an SEO to continue evolving Wordpress.

What is an executive summary?

Battle plans communicated as your oxygen supply expires.

Fast. Survival. Tell me which weapon, where, how (not why), when.

Speak about objectives and goal before you tell me tactics.

The exec needs to know the objectives.  The General will manage the tactics.

This post is meant to give you a high level view of how to best use GA.  Subsequent posts will tell you how to implement.

What I love about GA are the profiles.  Unlike other analytics packages, you can create a profile and use filters - this removes the needless exercise of “drilling down” to a particular channel to explore KPI’s- which, far too often (with other analytics packages) have a dead end.

I recommend setting up profiles for:

• All of your website (”all in”, as I call it)
• Organic
• PPC
• Mobile (my next post will be SOOOOO cool for you analytics geeks.  Get prepared for some advanced regular expressions stuff)
• Brand terms - most SEM campaigns report on performance without recognizing that brand terms are a “given”.  Create a filter to see how brand terms perform - this profile will also give you insight into the performance of channels like display, radio, television (awareness) perform - if you see a spike in brand terms, this is likely due to another channel that is otherwise difficult to track.
• Non-brand - create a profile that filters out brand terms so you can track the performance of your marketing efforts without the noise from other channels.
• Affiliate / partner - did you sign a partnership and want to see its performance?  Set up a filter.  Easy to report on.
• International - does your company report by region or by country? Align your marketing reporting with your company’s financial ones.  You can do this by country, region, or language.

That list is just a sample.  Come back for more details on HOW to set these up (particulary mobile!)