Imagine this… it’s 12 noon. You are just a month away from a major product launch. All estimates say that your product, out of the hundreds of similar products, will already garner more than 1% of the market the day it launches. Everything, in your mind, is great.

Suddenly, an editor from a popular blog that garners a major readership receives a bogus email from a supposed “trustworthy” source at your company, that the product you will launch in a month will not be released for another 5-6 months. Not missing a beat, they post the information to their blog and within moments it spreads like wildfire across the net. It spreads so fast that within less time than it takes you to brush your teeth, your company’s stock has lost $4 billion in market cap.

Think this is just a story? You’re wrong! Just last week the editors at Engadget received this same email talking about Apple’s iPhone, saying that it wouldn’t be released to the public until the Fall when the company is scheduled to release it next month. What happened? In 6 minutes the company lost $4 billion in market cap! Can you imagine?

The power of the online publicist is powerful. An angry blogger can tear a company down in a matter of minutes as we’ve seen and the readership can lead all the way from Wall Street to your front door. So with all this in mind, how do you combat this and stay ontop of your reputation with bloggers, the media, and your customers.

It’s simple… Online Reputation Monitoring.

We now offer a service to help you know when good, bad or indifferent news, opinions, and information is available online. With the success of blogs and RSS, it’s possible to be able to know within moments of new items concerning you or your company are made available. With Online Reputation Monitoring, you can be alerted instantly and more importantly react quicker to information that affects your business.

Like in the instance of Apple. Within 6 minutes the damage was done, but because of good contacts in the industry and quick reaction, their stock rebounded in the same amount of time.

If you’d like to know more or get started with Online Reputation Monitoring, click here to contact us today

Over the past two years, the marketing landscape has changed. Email marketing used to be the main forte behind online marketing, but as the web landscape changes, so to do our customers. The birth of this new landscape has given rise to a whole host of new media outlets and some old ones reborn. From mash ups, like Trulia; to user generated content, like Myspace; this new Web 2.0 landscape requires us to re-evaluate old marketing concepts and approaches to marketing in a way like never before. Below, I’ll document some important concepts for the beginner and for the experienced marketer wanting to find their edge in the new Web 2.0.

Wikinomics

Don Tapscott wrote a great book called Wikinomics in which he shows how mass collaboration changes everything. The birth of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia one of the biggest milestones. Wikipedia is based on the idea that one person or a group of individuals don’t need to have monopolistic control over the content of a website. So the website was born out of the idea that the public keeps it current and the information accurate. Wikipedia has turned out to be one of the largest sources of online reference material on the web today. And it’s growth is only a primary example of the way that user generated content can change the landscape.

User generated content is the biggest piece of the new puzzle. Sites likeMyspace and Facebook and private blogs have given the general public a voice and a place in the web that has never been as prevalent in the past. Coupled with the popularity of such features and the general free availability of the services, the popularity has grown to business owners and even some Fortune 500 companies too.

In fact, many search marketers are big proponents behind blogs and user generated content because of it offers fresh content and helps prevent latent semantic indexing from dropping you off the charts. And new generation marketers are big proponents because it gets the consumer behind that corporate wall and gives them a snapshot of who you are and what your company stands for.

Web 2.0 is also about user involvement and interaction. Both Pepsi and Coca Cola have shown this in a big way. It used to be that you could buy a Coke, take the cap off and know instantly whether you are are winner in one of their big contests. Now you have to log in to a website and enter a code to know if you’ve won. The biggest goals they are after here are demographics and user involvement. If you can excite a user, involve the user and even entertain the user, all the while gaining their trust and a bit of their information, you’ve got a gold-mine. Sales gurus would kill for this type of lead. This type of user involvement wasn’t easy and with the state-less way that the web is, a major change needed to occur to the way developers created websites to increase the satisfaction and the usability of website. Developers got just what they needed

Ajax

About 2 1/2 years ago developers stumbled across a technology that has been and will forever change the web development landscape. Developers discovered that when you combine the XML and Javascript, that you could get partial page reloads on websites. In layman’s terms, a website didn’t have to refresh the entire page in order for data to be transferred. Developers quickly enabled pages, forms and even database queries with this new technology. The benefit it gave the marketing landscape was the ability to have a website be much closer to the performance of a desktop application (The speed isn’t quite there, but it is a significant improvement).

Media Sharing

The other significant change in the new marketing landscape is the emergence of media sharing. A whole host of sites have emerged to help users organize, publish and store online media. Flickr, MediaMax, Box.net, have allowed for the storage and publication of photos causing a plethora of users to begin sharing their digital memories online. Sites like YouTube and JibJab, have allowed users to become their own media producer beginning a new wave of podcast and vodcasts. This has allowed seemingly unknown people to become virtual celebrities publishing their often humorous creations online.

The new marketer

So where does this put you. Where does it lead the old media marketer to begin to reach this new generation of Google-informed buyers and sellers who want nothing more than an honest deal (and, they’ll admit it, a little attention). The new marketer can benefit from this new landscape by becoming involved. Looking for ways to get to know these consumers on the same level. To find innovative ways to involve the consumer in the process and keep them informed. A new marketer needs to be fluent in the same technologies that your consumer is.

This means getting down into the nitty-gritty. Becoming a user of Myspace and storing digital media online; creating a blog and showing the consumer a different side of you even if it means showing some vacation photos with you in those hideous green pants. Knowing and engaging with the consumer on a more technologically savvy level is what will get you into their mind.

For those who have been in the search marketing world fro some time, Google’s ad model, Adwords, has become the highlight of paid search marketing and the center of controversy in the click fraud debate. Google’s popular advertising model has been based on a cost-per-click basis, until now. This week, Google brought a new ad model into beta testing based on cost-per-action. This new model allows the advertiser to only pay an amount when a desired action is complete (ie: lead conversion, product purchase, etc). This allows the advertiser a greater degree of control over when they pay for a lead and further helps reduce the amount of click fraud that advertisers are subject to with the current cost per click model. The even better deal is that you (the advertiser) decide how much you want to spend per action. While you are able to set up a budget with Adwords and bid on the keywords that you want to advertise under, you have little control over the actual CPC because the bid is affected by other users. And even then, there was no way to ensure that the click actually generated a conversion. This changes that and helps to ensure that advertisers pay for actual conversions.

Check out the press release

In the long run, there is a lot of change and evolution that this ad model will make before it is ready for prime-time and even then it will not take the place of the current ad model, but it will boost the confidence of the smaller advertiser in which ad budgets are a primary concern. Way to go Google.

Okay, I was reviewing some of the stats for my blog and happened to notice that Google picked up one of my posts and ranked it pretty high. Fortunately for me it happened to be my offical review of Gate.com hosting. That’s one thing I love about blogs… you might not be able to control what happens after you post something, but it sure sweetens the deal when you rank pretty high for something that you believe is important.

Check it out

UPDATE: Thus far, I have done a little more digging and found that I display for several keywords (”gate.com slow”, “gate.com slow dns”, and “admin support gate.com dns issue”). I’ll look under a few more terms to see what kind of damage I did.

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization is fast becomming one of the more preferred methods of modern advertising media. In fact, online marketing as a whole, is much higher than standard traditional media. And if your site isn't optimized, or if you have never thought to optimize your site, you are missing essential leads that are practically free. 

I always ensure that every one of my clients is fully optimized for the best performance in the search engines, but if you already have a site and need optimization services, I offer that as a separate service. In additio, I offer comprehensive Search Engine Optimization Reports that give you a full view of the current state of your site in the search engine rankings. 

Check out our website…especially the Search Engine Marketing button and see what we have to offer. http://www.idwebconsulting.com