There was an excellent article in Forbes magazine today about how Facebook and MySpace would like to help grow small businesses.

Ditch your Web site. Facebook and MySpace are eager to help small businesses find friends

A recent study of more than 20,000 online shoppers resulted in some key research findings about the effectiveness of various tools for acquiring customers.  As you read them you will see that they provide great insights that can easily be adapted to our industry.

• The #1 reason that a shopper visited a website online was because of familiarity with the brand.  This group also had the highest satisfaction score - 77%.
• Promotional e-mails are an effective marketing tool:  24% of shoppers came to a site because of promotional emails from the company.  This group is more satisfied than those who came to the site because of a search engine and is 16% more likely to buy than those who came through a search engine.
• Search engines and shopping comparison sites bring more first-time visitors, who are significantly less satisfied and less likely to buy.  While the largest group of first-time site visitors came via a search engine or shopping comparison site (29%), this group was less satisfied than first-time visitors who came the site because of familiarity with the brand or promotional emails.
• Word-of-mouth recommendations are more effective at driving desired future behaviors than offline advertising.  Satisfaction for online shoppers who came to the retail site based on recommendation enjoys a slight advantage over that of shoppers who were prompted by offline advertising.  But word of mouth has a significant advantage in driving the future behaviors of recommendation, online purchase and loyalty.

In light of these findings there are several best practices that can help us improve customer satisfaction with the site experience, relative to the acquisition source.

• Ensure complementary messaging between the acquisition source and landing page on the site.  When a prospect comes to a Web sites based on a paid search ad, the page they land on should be closely related to the ad they clicked on. 
• Analyze needs and perceptions of first time visitors.  They have no prior experience with your Web site and they often struggle to understand the organization of the site.  You want to make sure that you understand their greatest concerns so you can do a better job of creating a satisfying first visit that will keep them coming back, time after time.
• Explore what’s driving word-of-mouth recommendations.  One of the most certain and powerful reasons to recommend a Web site is to deliver a highly satisfying experience during the site visit.  The only way to do this is to analyze the high priority areas for improvement, based not only on satisfaction scores, but on projection of the relative influence of improving one aspect of the site experience over another.  Delivering a highly satisfying experience will gain you recommendations as well as future business and ongoing loyalty.

I believe that the Internet will continue to change the way we do business.  I don’t think I’d get much of an argument from anybody on that.  However, when I talk with my clients about strategic marketing initiatives that are web based, I often hear something like this “our clients don’t have computers so that probably wouldn’t work for them.”  I hear it less and less, but I still hear it. 

Well, I believe that the scales have tipped the other way and the majority of our clients do have computers.  That is confirmed to me more and more as I watch the email lists of my clients grow and I look at open and click through rates on emails that we send to clients.  I also see and measure pass along on some of the multimedia emails that we send and the opportunity that provides to grow our databases.

 It is such an exciting time to be a marketer.  Social networking, online video, email, podcasts, screencasts, the list is endless.  Are your clients on the web?  Yes they are - in droves.  If you’re not utilizing web based marketing strategies beyond just having a website, I recommend that you research options and make a few of these strategies part of your 2008 marketing program.

My Space allows members to customize their individual profile and in the process they have an opportunity to learn a great deal about their members.  So it just makes sense that in the very near future My Space advertising will be targeted based on the members profiles - just like we saw foreshadowed in the movie Minority Report a few years ago.

In today’s New York Times there was an article entitled “MySpace to Discuss Latest Efforts to Customize Ads for Members.”  According to the article “MySpace, the Web’s largest social network and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, says that after experimenting with technology over the last six months it can tailor ads to the personal information that its 110 million active users leave on their profile pages.”

 Currently when I visit My Space I see mass-market pitches for mortgages, online dating, etc.  But, if the future unfolds as anticipated, we may soon be presented with customized pitches during our online experience.  If and when that happens, the response will undoubtedly increase significantly, but the cost of the advertising will be greater as well.  Sounds like a win win to me!

So here is my first question… how might this work for my attorneys?  Let me tell you how it is supposed to work.  First of all, when Google bought YouTube they did not reveal any profit model that they might have had in mind, but it was obvious that that was part of the game plan. 

Well, today the New York Times reported that Google believes they have a formula that will work.  No, they will not put a ”preroll” on the video that requires the viewer to watch it prior to the video.  That just wouldn’t work for short form video and Google knows that or they would have tried it by now.  It is, however, used fairly effectively in long form video.

Instead the magic “formula” Google has in mind is to “introduce a new type of video ad,” which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.  Google’s director for media platforms describes the interface as a “user controlled ad format that is engaging.”

Basically, the ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.   The user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it.  But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing.  Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

In early tests, YouTube users clicked on overlays five to ten times more frequently than on banner ads.

 The video ad market is expected to double this year from last year to $775 million.  It has been projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

It looks like video ads are here to stay so we, in the PI industry, need to pay attention to this so that we can investigate ways to potentially benefit from this emerging form of web advertising.

 For more information, you can contact Cindy Speaker at 610-692-3217.

Syracuse, New York is at the center of a debate that recently challenged the limits placed on advertising for peronal injury attorneys.  Alexander & Catalano called itself “heavy hitters” in ads and had run TV commercials depicting its lawyers as giants towering over skyscrapers, counseling space aliens about an insurance dispute and speeding to reach a client.  Although some of the images were referred to in the case as “silly stuff” Gregory A. Beck, who argued the case, said that “attention-getting is what advertisements do.”

The case did a couple of things.  First of all the decision said that statewide rule changes that took effect on Feb 1 violated the free speech of lawyers.  It cleared the way for lawyers in New York to use pop-up ads on the Internet, but did not answer the bigger but more subtle issue of whether firms must label newlsetters and e-mail messages to clients as advertising.

According to the New York Times, “the new rules defined advertising as any public or private communication made on behalf of a lawyer or law firm about that law firm’s services, the primary purpose of which is for the retention of the lawer and the law firm.”  So does that mean that e-mail messages must have a note in the subject line stating that it is “attorney advertising” a designation that could trap the messages in spam filters?  A companion issue is the discussion as to whether or not it is necessary to include the disclaimer “attorney advertising” at the bottom of a firm’s web site and on any proposals seeking business.

All of this is rather unclear and will tend to vary from state to state.  If any of our readers have insight into these issues, please share it with us in the comments section of this post.

If you haven’t set up a LinkedIn account yet, this is something you want to do.  It’s free and it will take you about 10 minutes.  Simply go to www.linkedin.com and sign up for a free account. 

I would love to be your first connection!  You can find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/cindyspeaker .  I actually learned about linkedin after speaking at a conference.  One of the attendees, Ed Smith, was kind enough to write an unsolicited recommendation and sent me an invitation to connect.  I did.  It was that easy.

LinkedIn is the brainchild of Reid Hoffman.  He refers to the site as an opportunity for “relationship capital management (RCM).”  If you’ve heard of the Kevin Bacon concept of six degrees of separation, you will easily understand this.

Now, while you have a minute, sign up or leave a comment on this post with your name and email address and I’ll send you an invitation to get you started!

The new way of watching TV

All the things you love about TV, fused
with all the fun and interactive power of
the internet.

Internet TV will soon be a reality.  One of the early entries into the emerging field is www.joost.com which is now in beta.  They are offering about 100 channels so far.

Here’s what really caught my attention…Mr. Volpi, Joost’s chief executive said that “Traditional television as we know it is gradually going to go away.”  We just keep hearing different versions of that story.   I guess we better pay a little more attention.

I picked up the New York Times the other day and on the front page there was an article entitled “Internet Giants Vie to Snap Up Web Ad Firms.”  It talked about the race among industry power players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL to acquire small Internet advertising companies. 

NYT writer Miguel Helft states that “underlying the deals…is a transformation of the advertising world away from traditional media like television, radio and print.”  It is directly after that statement that chief executive of 360i, Bryan Wiener, makes the profound revelation that “we’ve reached a tipping point.”

How does this relate to the legal industry, and more specifically PI law?  How much time do you have?  LOL  The fact is the writing is on the wall.  Traditional mass media is experiencing diminished results with each passing month.  Replacing it in power and pervasiveness are targeted efforts to capture the vast niche audiences that turn to the Internet to assess credibility and make purchase decisions.

Bottomline:  it’s time to reallocate some of your traditional mass media advertising resources to the web.  Many opportunities exist in this arena so study it and choose your venues carefully.  Just don’t wait too long. 

Business Week arrived in my mailbox today and as I perused the table of contents I was drawn to an article entitled “Buying Clicks To A Tragedy.”  At first I thought it appalling but as I read it, I started to think about the practical application to our industry.

The fact is that there is an “ever-growing chunk of total revenues coming from the Web.”  Because of that, news outlets now “scramble their online marketing staffers as quickly as they do reporters when a big story hits.” 

And what does that tell us?  It tells us that once again, traditional mass media advertising is being replaced by the web.  The newspapers of the world have been forced to quickly adapt and embrace the web because their more traditional print medium is no longer as effective as it once was.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are millions of people that read newspapers.  They are not going away - at least not yet.  However, the web is becoming increasingly important.

And now the application to the PI industry.  This story immediately made me think of the biggest PI firms in the country.  When a relevant story hits, or a drug is recalled or a local catastrophe occurs, our ranks are so trained to call their advertising agency and scramble to run a series of TV spots.  That is if their advertising agency doesn’t call them first.  But how much of our time and resources are allocated to the web.

The Business Week article stated “At the risk of sounding crass, these do become marketing events for these news sites.”  When the Virginia Tech tragedy occurred the business operations of the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Time magazine bought ads on either Google or Yahoo so that anytime someone searched the phrase “Virginia shooting,” their links would pop up prominently on the right-hand side of the page.  That strategy is called pay per click advertising, and I’ve found it to be very effective when properly researched and placed. 

So let me ask you this.  How are you embracing and utilizing Web 2.0?  However that might be, I suggest that you step it up a few notches.  If you want to talk about it, give me a call at 610-692-2950.