She is also this year’s president of the Business Marketing Association’s Phoenix chapter.

And we have our first HTC Incredible fan!

This image of a “virtual” Times Square reinforces the idea that businesses today need to operate in the “real” world and the “cyber” world.

When I talk with clients about the importance of an online strategy, I still see some reluctance. It’s time-consuming, there’s a cost involved, it’s unclear if it’s effective, and our customers really aren’t online are some of the refrains.

But those opinions ignore reality; there is a cyber world out there and, like it or not, your business is in it already.

Consider it “space”: people are in there sharing information and recommendations, on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, blogs, consumer forums, and user-review websites. Don’t you think you should be there?

Companies large and small need to have a strategy for competing in the virtual world, just as they have a strategy for the real world. If they devote attention to how employees answer the phone, where to distribute ads or flyers, and what the office or storefront looks like, they also need to do that online.

There are four key online segments for any business. Some may be more important to you than others, but each is significant.

1. Listening: It is very easy for individuals to express opinions today and publish them for wider distribution than just the table at the coffee shop. To protect your brand, you need to know what’s being said, who is saying it and what traction it may be gaining. This can be done by an employee using search or, for larger firms, a provider like Radian6 or Synthesio. While critical comments can be demoralizing, they create an opportunity to win back fans by solving problems. Interacting with them is more beneficial than ignoring them.
2. SEO: Ted Turner once explained his secret to success this way – “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” In 2010, advertising can be often be equated to how your business shows up in user searches. If you Google your brand and you’re not on the first page, you need an optimization effort. This involves website design, titles, keywords and a host of other factors. Don’t overlook this fundamental necessity: You probably rely on Google or Yahoo or Bing; so do your customers.
3. Engagement: There has been some discussion that corporations today don’t even own their brand. Customers do, and they can make it or break it through their comments. Imagine if your company could harness the allegiance, emotions, suggestions and megaphones of your customers. Would that make a difference in a positive way? The virtual world affords easier ways to get immediate feedback, identify and hone new products or services, and build brand loyalty. Rather than expect individuals to visit your website, companies need to go where they are – like Facebook or Youtube – and interact with them. And use tools like email and Twitter to solicit feedback and – most importantly – engage customers in a positive way.
4. Thought Leadership: In a world drowning in information, people thirst for knowledge. Every company – from the cell-phone provider to the extermination service – has the opportunity to educate customers on trends, innovations, regulations and challenges. Done in a timely and succinct manner, a company can extend its brand, become a trusted resource – and increase sales. If you’re not doing it, someone else is.

Of course, one size does not fit all. Most companies may find only a few of these “channels” to use, based on their market, their product or service and their capabilities.

Before your company jumps in, it’s vital to identify your objective, know your target audience and its preferences, and select the “tools” (social media, email, SEO etc.) that will be most impactful.

To sum up: Don’t forget about the “real” world. Just don’t ignore the “cyber” one.

Fresh off her talk last week to the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association, Kloefkorn had the dais to herself July 20 in an afternoon presentation to the Business Marketing Association’s Phoenix chapter at SkySong in Scottsdale. (Co-presenter
Fionn Downhill, CEO of Elixir Interactive, was ill.)

For 90 minutes Kloefkorn provided a “state of search engine optimization” address for about 50 media professionals. She led the group through recent changes in search and the top 10 facets of on-site and off-site search to embrace.

“SEO is not just meta tags, titles and keywords,” she said. “Now it’s find, index, categorize, and rank web content.”

Search has also moved beyond the “universal” search users are most familiar with. For example, searches are now being personalized based on the individual’s prior searches, she said.

“Google is tracking your searches,” Kloefkorn said, noting that one user’s mention of COBRA may turn up a piece of electronics, not the health-care option, if he had previously searched “CB radios.”

Similarly, Microsoft’s Bing considers itself a “decision engine,” anticipating what the user means when using search, to streamline the experience.

Bing has effectively grabbed the travel-arrangements segment in search and has its eyes on education, she said.

Google Caffeine is a new infrastructure the company is using to index web pages. Thus, if your page is a slow-loader because of images or volume, you may be penalized, she said.

Then there are the “big three” of 2010: Local search, mobile search, and video search.

Search results based on the user’s location – providing convenient and local products, services and businesses – is becoming more common. Google features such local results toward the bottom of its results pages.

“Google wants to provide relevant results,” she said.

Video search is booming, while social search (of social media websites) is also gaining.

KEO Marketing’s Sheila Kloefkorn was the guest speaker at the July 20 meeting of the Business Marketing Association Phoenix chapter. Al Maag of Avnet is its president.

Kloefkorn emphasized that web-page builders need to optimize their work for search engines.

“Google sees a bunch of text,” she said. Fancy images, graphics and pieces in Adobe Flash can’t be read by search engines.

She suggested visiting www.webconfs.com to test what search engines see on your site.

She offered a SEO primer on the “top 10″ elements to address on your company’s website:

1. Keywords or phrases in the title tag (the words at the top of the web page)
2. Keywords or phrases in the H1 or headline tag (the first words on the page)
3. Internal link/external link to anchor text on the page (repeating the full keywords in links, not just “click here for more information”)
4. The first 50 words in the HTML on the page
5. Meta description tag (the site’s name and information like phone numbers and forms, but remember to include a call to action, she said)
6. A URL structure with keywords (i.e. www.johnswolfe.com/socialmedia/3-facets-of-effective-non-profit-websites)
7. Other headline tags
8. Image Alt text
9. The number of repetitions in the HTML text
10. Keyword use in image names (labeling an image with specific names or companies, instead of “pic3″ or “event photo7″, and use dashes, not underscores)

Sheila Kloefkorn speaks at SkySong on July 20.

Kloefkorn then noted that your SEO effort also has to include “off-site” strategies, ways to tie your site to others, so search engines are impressed by your vitality. This is where engagement with customers through social media like Facebook and Twitter creates a network that boosts your site’s prominence.

The second “top 10″:

1. Use unique content (not syndicated or “re-freshed” content) on the page; search engines like original content
2. Employ keywords used by individuals in their searches in the article or video title or description
3. Be fresh; search engines like “recency,” which is why blogs have soared up results
4. Create internal links on your site to other pages on the website
5. Change your content frequently
6. Use external-pointing links, like back-links from other websites like media or trade associations
7. Use keywords in the URL
8. Minimize the amount of code showing up within the text in the HTML
9. Make sure there’s a meta description tag
10. Seek HTML validation from W3C standards

The Google vs. Yahoo search fight has a new look, now that Microsoft’s Bing has been connected to Yahoo. Kloefkorn noted that in June Google saw its first decline in market share for at least five years.

It went from 65% of all searches to 62%. Yahoo’s 19% and Bing’s 12% gave the partnership new weight – and a legitimate option for businesses looking at paid search advertising. (Ask.com‘s 3% and AOL‘s 2% were the other choices.)

“It’s important when you consider that 1% market share equals about $100 million a year,” she said.

She noted that this week the Bing/Yahoo is taking shape.

“You will start to see different results on Yahoo because they will be coming from Bing,” she said.

Why is search so important? Because studies show that 92% of purchases are made by consumers who use it before the sale. Kloefkorn guessed that the remaining 8% of purchases are likely groceries.

And paid search is valuable because companies may not have the resources to generate fresh content and optimize web pages to move up the “natural” search results.

***

The BMA’s next event will be a sports marketing discussion at Chase Field on Aug. 17, prior to the Diamondbacks’ game against the Cincinnati Reds.

The second annual Technology Marketing Summit will be held Sept. 23 at the Phoenix Convention Center.

But that doesn’t mean they should ignore the Web altogether.

The July 13 meeting of AZIMA – the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association – featured a second panel of Internet marketing consultants, who looked at the site of a Phoenix-based non-profit group. WingstoFly.info promotes building self-esteem in young women ages 12 to 17, primarily through one-week educational camp in the summer.

The panel analyzed the site based on usability, search engine optimization and social media links.

Panel 2: From left, David Wallace of SearchRank, Ward Andrews of Drawbackwards and design.org, and Matt O’Brien of Mint Social

Usability, by Ward Andrews of Drawbackwards and founder of design.org:

•           To dream, inspire and empower are all good parts of the story. Take that image area and also have a call to action there, to tell the story and also have the visitor take action toward a goal.

•           “Hover over” navigation no longer works. This has more importance as users adopt devices like touch interfaces like on the iPad.

•           Instead of photos of the girls at the camp, show a video of them having fun camp. Embed the video from your YouTube channel. This builds a social outpost off-site and upgrades the quality of storytelling on-site.

•           On the home page, instead of describing “quick links,” describe what the list is about. If the list is about sponsors and donors, who you are recruiting as well as highlighting, list them with their logos. “It’s a sales tool,” he said.

•           One of the site sections is for after-school programs, there is nothing listed. I recommend you not include links until the content is there, he said.

SEO, by David Wallace of SearchRank:

• Many non-profits haven’t done much with search engine optimization but it’s crucial, he said.
• First, use a keyword search to determine the words and phrases people are using when doing a search.
• Next, employ keyword mapping to assign specific words to specific pages, the ones best suited to match searches.
• Each page should have unique title tags, with keywords and the brand name.
• Don’t forget a meta tag, the description of the organization and its mission, with keywords, for the website.
• You need to use header tags, and footer tags.
• If you use cascading style sheets for design, you made need to adjust them to include keywords.
• Use of p tags will make pages load faster.
• Include a link in images in order to show up on Google’s Image search.
• The site has nice incoming links from KNIX and KNXV-Channel 15. The group may want to pursue more of these, as part of a strategy to build the site as an authority in this domain.
• .info is a bit out of the mainstream. “It would be great if you could get the .com or .org domain,” he said.

Social media, by Matt O’Brien of Mint Social:

• WingstoFly does have a Twitter account but it doesn’t seem to be your audience. You have the girls attending the camp and the parents who would like to send their daughters to camp.
• The group does have an interesting Facebook page. But there isn’t a prominent tie-in to the page from the website.
• What are your content strategies? If the girls are “cold turkey” on gadgets during the camp, could volunteers capture the cool things going on?
• The Wing Story is buried on the home page and difficult to find. This is your biggest asset, so find a way to tell it on video or using Flickr. “Your audience is out on social networks,” O’Brien said. “You need to go there to engage them.”
• The group’s blog is also hard to find. This needs to be a part of the website, with a domain of www.wingstofly.info/blog.
• Pare down the site to tell WingstoFly’s story. Celebrate your big fund-raisers and donors.
• Is there a contest that you can introduce, perhaps for scholarships?
• In the off-season, can the girls participate by talking about their experiences at camp?
• The kids will be viral so you need to make the parents aware of the camp.
• You may also want a listening strategy. Perhaps there are parents looking for answers to some problems with their daughters. If you find forums or follow tweets where these discussions are taking place, you can participate and bring up WingstoFly, the website and the camp.

Stefan Hull didn’t mince words.

Every website needs to be managed, every keyword or tag needs to be promoted. The name of the game is search engine optimization.

“You should already be having that done, like hygiene,” the business director of Propellernet told the June 17 Social Media Marketing conference in London.

Now it’s about outreach and engagement.

“Links are the currency,” he said. “Brands are either networked or invisible.”

Marketing today is search, social media, online public relations and offline collateral.

“Google listens to conversations,” Hull said. “Links differentiate you.”

Stefan Hull discusses SEO at the Social Media Marketing event in London.

Hull presented two case studies.

The first involved Westfield Village, an upscale shopping center in London.

The customer sought to “own” the search phrase “London shopping.”

Westfield was planning a big event, “The Greatest Fashion Show on Earth.”

Propellernet proposed a strategy to work with “key influencers.”

They created a “blogger relations” team, Googled the keywords and identified the names and websites that came up most frequently.

Then they phoned them.

They shared information about the event, offered them backstage passes to the show, and provided exclusive content to them.

“The key was doing it in person,” Hull said.

He emphasized that Westfield sought to act ethically and to create genuine relationships.

All the company asked was, in covering the event for the blog, to include a link to Westfield Village and to use the words “London shopping” in the write-up.

Search engines would then quantify the links and the presence of the “London shopping” words — “anchor text” in SEO parlance — within the blogs and, voila, Westfield Village would move up the list.

“We wanted the inbound links to Westfield Village,” Hull said.

With more visitors coming to the site, Westfield was ready. It had created a video that through “hotspotting” would allow users to click on any particular item to stop the video and get more information.

“We called it ‘the Virus,’” he said.

Westfield is now third or fourth on the “London shopping” search.

“And I predict it will be No. 1 by the end of the year,” Hull said. “We know the number of links needed to move up!”

Hull’s second case study involved sportsshoes.com.

Another client was sportsshoes.com. It was looking for ways to boost sales of running shoes.

In search marketing, this could be tricky. “Running shoes” may be used by hardcore runners, regular exercisers, “Race for the Cure”-type enthusiasts or simple “mud” runners.

Hull’s company asked, “Where do hardcore runners ‘live’ online?”

In running clubs.

The firm targeted the top 30 running clubs they could find and asked runners – “real people,” he said – to write reviews of their products.

While some companies might be fearful of inviting criticism in such a forum, sportshoes.com looked at it differently.

“Even bad ones helped the company, in identifying problems or asking for new features,” he said.

“The Running Blog” offered a kit for runners, a badge, and a link to the sportshoes.com company page.

“In 2008 we were not in the top 100 in search,” Hull said. “Today we are No. 1.”

This is crucial because studies have shown that searchers rarely venture “below the fold” on the search screen. About 66% click on the first three listings, he said.

The lesson: “Social networks and searches reflect people’s motivations,” Hull concluded.

But marketing today has so many facets that a professional must be adept at many to implement a successful campaign.

“There are many roads to Rome,” the CEO of Apogee Results said. “And once you figure it out, it will probably change.”

Bill Leake

His aim was to share 10 takeaways that audience members could implement in the next week.

1. Define the objective
   

   Companies need to align their sales and marketing efforts and invest in a strategic plan.

2. Implement end-to-end tracking
   

   Manage lead generation and measure results. Consider a program like salesforce.com to tie web analytics to the company’s CRM system.

3. Offer compelling content
   

   The trick to better placement on Google is to mix new content with old links. So have a plan for producing new content. Some companies use social media (comment boards, photos) to create their content, which Leake sees as a form of recycling. Companies also need to know the likes and dislikes of the customer in order to provide the information he or she seeks. Finally, companies have more success when they teach, not sell.

4. Mine your existing assets
   

   Don’t be afraid to re-use what you have. The old content can spur new discussions and seed new content. One “white paper” on a current topic can be used as a blog post, a radio or web interview, a video, a conference presentation or as part of an e-newsletter. If you are a Twitterer, tweet at least three times a day and then pick out the most interesting tweets to expand into blog posts.

5. Give your Search Engine Marketing a facelift
   

   Is your company on auto-pilot? Is your search performance flat? Don’t just sit there!

   1. Do Google searches on your targeted query
   2. Improve your Google score by testing various ad-copy words and page designs
   3. Add negative keywords – words that don’t apply to your products (like “free” or “open source”) – to draw attention and comparisons
   4. Make your ads more specific; in this way prospects will be of a higher quality for conversion
   5. Consider new tactics, like changing the day of the week or time of day for activitiy

   Leake then offered some advanced SEM strategies:

   1. Integrate paid search and earned media (like online articles, press release mentions and third-party blogs)
   2. If you have a “channel” of content use it – and reach out to partners to fill it. (Think of a cooperative.)
   3. Partner with others to create a “learning” website
   4. Employ event-driven results with customized landing pages for special promotions
   5. Use SEM traffic with web analytics to create customer lists

6. Increase, start (but don’t stop) investment in SEO
   

   Maintaining an email list of your best prospects is probably the most effective retention tool. But SEO is valuable and is often the best at measuring the return on a marketing investment. He noted that Google is getting more sophisticated with its search results, offering SEO for videos, books, maps, news, and images. Companies like jigsaw and hoovers offer analytics tools.

7. Assess your website’s effectiveness
   

   Qualitative: What are the industry’s best practices? Which customer personas do you want to chase (and which ones are comfortable letting go)?

   Quantitative: What are your analytics for page views? Consider using a test of two web-page designs – A and B – to determine which attracts better prospects. Assess multivariants – but not a lot of them – to determine what elements work well together.

   Customer personas fall in four categories:

   Logical
   

Emotional

Quick decisions Slow decisions

Know which is your best prospect and how to serve him or her.

8. Move past online conversions

A lot happens beyond the web. Conversions initiated by the website may result in phone calls, chats, and in-store visits. See the big picture.

9. Nurture non-sales-ready leads

In a world with many leads, 20 percent are usually followed up on. Of those, 70 percent are usually disqualified. Of those disqualified leads, 50 percent tend to buy a product anyway. The advice: Keep your hook in the water.

10. In most cases, don’t focus on “lead” scoring (yet), Leake said.

“Everyone knows the 80-20 rule,” he said. “This is an advanced tactic to filter leads.” But don’t make impulsive decisions. Leake cited a case in which a financial firm was deciding which search-engine to use for marketing, Google or Yahoo. The marketing chief’s hunch was Google; the actual data of results showed that, while Yahoo generated fewer leads, the ones that it did provide were worth more to the firm than the Google leads.

In the end, Leake advisers companies to know their customers. Some customers may be coupon clippers, with no loyalty to the product.

Use specific codes or keywords for website specials to identify customers and their decisions.

Build your email list of customers with incentives to sign up.

And make the phone number on the website bigger! “It offers a better chance for upsells,” he said.

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