A couple weeks ago, I asked whether your marketing was about transactions or relationships, and got some good reaction from readers interested in exploring this idea further.

Coincidentally, JupiterResearch recently came out with a report on Dealaholics, those sharp-eyed bargain hunters with loyalty as deep as today’s lowest price. As you think about your online marketing tactics, you need to consider whether you are offering deals that create transactions but no loyalty. What kinds of offers are you making to attract new customers? Do you track the success, not of the offer, but of the relationship?

The Jupiter report notes that single-offer deal campaigns aren’t likely to engender long-term loyalty. Jupiter notes that the My Coke Rewards program, which provides value for long-term purchases is more what marketers should be shooting for.

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I’m so excited I’m just about to burstMy latest e-book “The Small Business Website Bible” is officially launched!!

This one is for all the entrepreneurs out there who have spent WAY too much money on a Website that doesn’t do jack to grow their business. And all those who are worried about doing just that as they get their first Website up and running.

I teach a lot of workshops on Websites, and I’ve heard far too many horror stories Sometimes people get taken advantage of by Web designers or developers who sell them all kinds of fancy hoo-ha they don’t need.

It reminds of those old tales of young women walking into the auto mechanics garage and getting taken to the cleaners because they didn’t know the first thing about cars. That’s not to say that all Web designers and developers are crooks (though there are a few, just like in any profession).

Other times, they just want to build you the kind of site they know how to build, or that everyone else in your field has.
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If you’re on a social networking site, chances are you have less than 100 friends. If you have thousands, you’re not only in the minority, but you’re probably male.

According to a large study of people with at least one friend on a social networking site, men have more friends than women. Men and women also seem to be motivated by different values. That’s the conclusion of a study by Rapleaf of 30.74 million social networkers.

There are some interesting patterns about how the number of friends we have and why. This may not come as a surprise - overall men are more focused on acquiring “friends” than building relationships with them. Women spend more time on social network sites but aren’t as likely to have more than 1,000 friends.

The information comes from these sites: Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr, and others. Of this group:

• 80% have fewer than 100 friends.

  Women have on average 62 friends. Men have on average 57 friends. The majority are women.

• 9% have more than 100 friends.
  
  Women have on average 185 friends. Men have on average 172 friends. The majority are women.
• Less than 1% have more than 1,000 friends.
  
  Women have on average 1,837 friends. Men have on average 1,944 friends. This group is more likely to be men.
• .02% have more than 10,000 friends.
  
  Women have on average 24,077 friends. Men have on average 24,584 friends. This group is more likely to be men.

I don’t know if they excluded people like “Tom” on MySpace who befriends everyone and others who want to be like Tom - a friend to all. I’m curious of Marketing Pilgrim readers, how many friends do you have on what sites and how much time do you spend interacting with them?
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I had the chance to speak to 150 folks belonging to the World Trade Center (yes, it’s an organization) yesterday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the subject of marketing your business globally.

I’ve appeared there twice before and am always struck by the mix of local businesses (large and small) and foreign embassies promoting trade with their countries. You can download my slides on Internet Marketing Trends, but I wanted to talk a bit about what I heard there and what I told the audience. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a web site address to call home, a business is homeless. It’s seen by customers as the equivalent of working with a computer in the dusty corner of the garage near the clothes dryer lint trap.

Many small business owners start this way, working out of a P.O. Box and sharing the family phone line with a teenage daughter who believes that talking to her BFF is far more important than business calls on that phone line.

Face it, it’s time to buy that $7.95 domain name and start down the road to business legitimacy. Just as we have gone from “Do you have a fax machine?” to “What is your fax number?”, so too are we moving rapidly away from “Do you have a web site?” toward “What is your web address?”. How is it that we accept the need for the fax machine, the copy machine, the phone and the computer, but not a web site?

Every business is expected to be online, just as they are expected to have a telephone and a fax and an answering machine. Size will always determine resource allocation. Hire a professional if you can, but get online now!

The first step to getting your business Online is to get a domain name, which is typically your business name or generic word or phrase and includes the famous dot com, dot net, and .org extensions. Here’s a complete tutorial on Domain Names to help you learn everything about choosing a name for your web site and how domain names work to help you navigate the web.

Or, you could just research a domain name now, buy it today and grow your business.
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This article at CNET, “Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?“, caught my eye. Large corporations definitely feel nervous about allowing all their employees to have a public voice, but I think it’s now something that must be allowed, and good common-sense management can be used to help avoid some of the risk of lawsuits such as the one mentioned in the article involving Cisco.

Some companies’ legal departments think that blogging is just too risky to allow, and that it’s not worth the time and administrative headache to try to manage. The problem that I see with this is that it causes a company to be stuck in a Business 1.0 world of the past, disallowing the grass-roots-level public relations that employees can provide - blogging allows a big corporation to have a human face and can help explain and communicate what the company is up to.

More importantly, attempting to disallow employee blogging at all would push employees to do the very thing that Cisco is having to deal with: anonymous blogging. Employees who don’t understand nor agree with the corporate blogging policy will end up blogging anyway, under aliases.

Sun Microsystems’ 4,000+ employee blog is probably the gold standard for corporate-blessed blogging, but many other companies have effectively leveraged blogging and there are particularly well-known bloggers out there who are associated with major companies. Just a small sampling includes: Read the rest of this entry »

I was approached by a friend with an idea. It went along the lines of “What if we get a group together to promote this cause…” and from that point on my imagination soared with what-ifs and can-we’s.

And I wondered about the can of worms we might be opening.

Those of you in Facebook know from experience that when someone who is your “friend” joins a cause, everyone gets a notice about it. After awhile, we begin to get a sense of what our friends are interested in, besides work. We can gauge how well matched we are, how different we might be from each other and see sides of friends we never knew about. Read the rest of this entry »

VentureBeat talked to Google’s Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search Products & User Experience, about Google’s future: specifically about their future in social search.

VentureBeat notes that as recently as August, Mayer “said social search hasn’t shown much promise, but if it does, Google would be in a good position to incorporate it.”
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Hitwise has some new numbers about social networking sites.

Though down, MySpace is still gets the most traffic with 76% of visits in 2007. It’s actually down. Number two, Facebook is up 51%. They monitored 53 different social networking sites to get the data.

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You know those “new” episodes of your favorite TV show when a character gets hit by a car, and then all their friends gather by their bed side and retell their favorite stories through a series of clips?

Welcome to my clip show.

Here’s a quick list of the 12 articles we published in flyte log, our monthly Web marketing ezine:
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