Web Analytics
Any effort begins with a web analytics package. This should be a no-brainer. If you have a website you need to know how much traffic you’re getting and where it’s coming from. Are search engines sending you traffic? Are the blog posts that you’re writing generating any traffic for you? Even the simplest analytics packages can provide this data for you. There are dozens of choices so initially I’d say don’t get too bogged down in this feature vs. that, just start collecting data. You can switch later if something becomes important.

Here’s a handful of options, in no particular order.

• Google Analytics – probably the most popular. It’s free and feature loaded. 95% of sites on the web will never need more than this. The only drawback is that the data isn’t instant, today’s traffic shows up in tomorrow’s numbers.
• Woopra – a very good choice, feature rich tool with live data (see today’s data right now), campaign and conversion tracking, and more. Pricing is reasonable and is based on the number of pageviews a site recieves, but there is a free version which should be sufficient for most small sites.
• Piwik – this is another free tool, and bills itself as an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It has all of the features of the most robust tools, with the added benefit that all of the data is entirely yours because it runs on your own webserver.
• KISSmetrics – this is a newly available tool, and has an interesting twist on other options. They track people, not visits. This likely makes them a great choice for those new to web analytics. Pricing starts at $149 per month.
• SiteCatalyst – this has traditionally been the choice of larger sites that require advanced reporting. There is no free version, but the data is customizable and real time.

Taking it a Step Further – As soon as you begin working with web analytics, you’ll probably start to have questions about which visitors are the most valuable. This is where things begin to get interesting. Suppose you’re running two campaigns, an AdWords campaign and a web banner campaign, which of them is generating the most business for you? Which of them generates repeat visits or the most pageviews? Any of the packages listed above can provide this information for you. For more information try reading Avinash Kaushik’s web analytics blog or the SEOmoz blog.

Click Heatmaps
Once your site has some traffic to work with, you’ll want to identify what on your site is working for you, and what isn’t. Does the site’s navigation structure do a good job of drawing people further into the site? Does one section of the site continually underperform in relation to the others? Web analytics can only take you so far, now you need tools to evaluate how effective your site’s layout is. Heatmaps to the rescue.

A heatmap is a tool that shows you where visitors are clicking on your site. While that sounds pretty simple, the data is VERY revealing. Here are the tools to provide this data.

• Clickdensity – very affordable tool with nice data presentation. And, they include a hover map, which can give you information about which content your visitors are reading.
• ClickTale – this tool has some nice features over the others, in the way of reporting. The heatmaps can be displayed a couple of different ways, data sets can be filtered, and they also provide information on form conversions. They also provide complete click paths and hover maps. This is the most expensive tool in the list, but you get the most data.
• CrazyEgg – fantastic tool, beautiful interface, and quite affordable as well.
• ClickHeat – this tool is different than the others. It’s an open source package that you install yourself. It’s not as feature rich as the others here, but its free which is what you may be looking for. This will be sufficient for most users, but advanced skills will be needed for installation & setup.

One quick note, anyone familiar with Google Analytics will know that there’s a site overlay that shows you where people are clicking. This is not the same thing, and if you rely on this you’ll be missing data. The site overlay tool only shows the LINKS that people are clicking on. If they click on an image hoping to leave the page, and it isn’t a link, you’ll never know that you’re misleading your visitors with that image. Unless, of course, you’re using a real heatmap tool such as the ones listed above.

If your site is having trouble with converting the traffic that it receives, give one of these tools a try and find out where your visitors are getting stuck. It’s simpler than it sounds, and the imagery is both fun and informative.

Taking it a step further – Hover maps will tell you where your visitors are looking (assuming that the eyes follow the mouse, which is a fair approximation in most cases). This will tell you which content on your site is getting the most attention.

A/B Testing
Once you know which parts of your site are drawing the most attention, you’re going to want to make changes to the other areas to increase conversions. Don’t just wing it, test everything and find out what works the best! A/B testing is the process of trying two versions of one piece of content (text, button, image, etc) to find out which works best. Most of the time you will be testing a call to action, but the tool isn’t limited to this.

Here are the tools available.

• Google Website Optimizer – this is the most popular tool. It’s likely the most well documented and it’s free. It’s also capable of A/B tests or multivariable testing.
• Genetify – this tool is a free, light weight script that you install on the pages that you’ll be testing. It provides all of the information needed to determine what’s working and what isn’t, but there aren’t pretty graphs or charts on the reports.
• Visual Website Optimizer – this is a fee based service for website optimization that’s loaded with features. It is capable of handling multivariable testing, and it even includes heatmaps. This service also includes real time reporting. The pricing is reasonable and they’re loaded with features.

A/B testing is real work. It takes time to determine what to test and create multiple versions of the same content. It’s time well spent though. The lessons learned here produce real results, because you’re actively involved in improving your conversion rates. Every major website that you see today does this, whether it’s to increase sales or draw more user comments.

One thing to keep in mind as you’re testing the attributes of your site is that it takes time to determine the results. Without getting too technical, statistics comes into play, so the smaller the data set you’re working with, the less accurate the results will be.

Take it a step further – You really should be A/B testing everything; website content, calls to action, conversion funnels, imagery, navigation structure… everything. This is the tool that will make your website and all of your marketing materials a well tuned machine for bringing in new business. Once you’re comfortable that your website is doing everything it can, A/B test banner creative, AdWords messaging, landing pages, email marketing, etc. Obviously the tools listed above can’t help with anything outside of your website, but don’t let that stop you. Once you have the data from the tests, plug it in to Split Test Calculator and it’ll tell you which is the better, as well as how confident it is in its answer.

If A/B testing is a new thing for you, there are a couple of resources which will help you through the process. There’s an Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing at Smashing Magazine which is quite good. Which Test Won & ABtests.com both show the results from tests, which is pretty informative.

By now you can tell that when you pay attention to the details, there is plenty that you can do to bring in business through your website. The primary benefit of these strategies is that they’re all quantitative. If you find something that works, you’ll know it, and vice versa. As you apply these methods, they can inform your entire marketing effort. If you know of other tools, or other strategies give a shoutout in the comments.

First, a quick introduction. Guy is a notable blogger, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist as well as a recent author.

The title of the presentation was Using Twitter as a Marketing Weapon, a bullet list of his points is available. He covered eight major things about using Twitter for marketing, and used plenty of examples. Here we go.

Monitor – Guy gave a few examples of using Twitter search to keep up with conversations that are happening around companies, industries, product lines, and even all conversation through a specific account. Nothing fancy here, just recapping the possibilities. The main point here is that Twitter search provides powerful means to keep up with conversations about you, your competition, or anyone else.

Engage – Your company should have an account on Twitter. He didn’t spend much time here, so I won’t either.

Sell – Its possible to use Twitter directly to increase revenue. I’ve covered this before. Guy gave a couple of examples that are noteworthy. Dell Outlet has generated millions by announcing specials online. At this point Guy gave a shout out to Dell for their creativity here, and asked if anyone in the audience works for them. When someone stuck their hand up Guy jokingly asked if he gets a computer for plugging them, and the Dell person said, “First you have to learn to pronounce ‘Inspiron’ properly.” Ouch! Snarky! Guy didn’t skip a beat; he went right in to his next example. Kogi BBQ is a single truck that sells Korean Mexican tacos throughout Los Angeles. They use Twitter to announce where they’re headed a few hours before they move, and they’ve managed to build their Twitter following up to 60,000 people. They said when they pull up to a new spot there are usually about 50 people waiting for fresh tacos when they arrive. THAT’s pretty awesome.

Support – He talked about two companies that are using Twitter to provide support, Virgin America and Comcast. Apparently a passenger on a Virgin flight once tweeted that the flight attendant forgot to serve his meal. Someone at that account got in touch with the pilots, who then relayed the message back to the attendant and the man received his food after all. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is its a pretty powerful example of the use of Twitter.

Prospecting – This is the point at which Guy’s message started to capture my attention. He presented some pretty creative methods of finding potential clients through Twitter advanced search and Google’s search operators. Did you know that Twitter allows you to do localized searches, such as pizza in Austin? Suppose you want to sell equipment to wedding photographers, you can use Google to search through Twitter names (note that this will search through both user names and real names). Would you rather search through Twitter bios to find the person you’re after? That’s no problem! I have to say, I’ve known about each of these features of Twitter & Google, but had never put this together. Brilliant!

Get More Followers: Focus on Content – Here Guy stresses the importance of saying something that’s worth being heard. We’ve all seen tweets that aren’t worth reading, most of us have probably even posted a few. Guy provides a few sources for quality content, Alltop (of course) is an aggregator of news from across the web, StumbleUpon is content that people have voted up, and SmartBrief categorizes news into industry specific feeds. He attributes his success on Twitter (more than 200k followers) to regularly providing links to interesting/useful/insightful stories. His content is re-tweeted hundreds of times each day, which confirms his hunch.

Get More Followers: Tweet! – Once you’re on top of great content, take advantage of some tools that help you manage the flow of tweets through your account. Guy spent quite a bit of time talking about Objective Marketer, which is a service that allows you to automatically resend tweets throughout the day. Get 90 days free with the promo code “wiseguy”! Guy does send each tweet more than once; he said that over time he’s seen that when he sends a tweet a 2nd, 3rd & 4th time, the number of clicks on his links go up accordingly. So sending a tweet out for times in one day generates approximately four times the number of clicks. Once again, brilliant. He also introduced TwitterFeed & TwitHawk. TwitterFeed is a service that automatically tweets the contents of an RSS feed such as your blog. TwitHawk continually searches for a specific set of criteria and then will allow you to either automate a reply, or you can manually reply.

Tools – He spoke briefly about Twitter clients, you’ll definitely want one. Guy uses TweetDeck, I’ve tried several and it’s my favorite also.

On the drive back to the office, Nikki & I agreed that this was one of the best marketing seminars that we’ve attended. All of the info that Guy gave was relevant and helpful. I’m encouraged to renew my commitment to social marketing. And if I ever had any doubt, I’m now even more convinced that Twitter is greater than Facebook. Its openness and flexibility, when combined with the right tools, make it a pretty valuable weapon to have in your marketing arsenal. In case you haven’t done it yet, go follow Guy Kawasaki and RMM Online. As a bonus, if you want to get links to his talking points, you can text “alltop” to 44133.

Don’t be fooled. Yes, the snake oil hucksters that schlep keyword stuffing and link spamming are doomed, but their future was never very bright to begin with. If this is your strategy you’ll get nowhere, and if you’re paying for this then you’re wasting your money. If you’re charging someone for this, shame on you.

The core aspects of SEO, however, are needed more than ever. Google alone averages more than 200 million searches per day. With that much daily traffic, their view of your website matters. Do you really want to completely ignore the potential to earn traffic from them? Or worse, leave it entirely to chance? If you get one ten-thousandth of one percent of that (that’s 0.0001%), 200 people per day will see your site. Do that many people cross your doorstep each day? Does your phone ring that many times each day? Clearly there is an upside to paying attention to Google.

The traffic that your website receives can provide keen insight into what your target market thinks about your company. Whatever the goals of your company, your website can help you get there. Increasing sales, improving customer retention, reaching a new customer base, improving the return that you get on your AdWords spend… these are all achievable. As long as you are measuring your website’s traffic and can recognize trends, you can reach your goals.

Don’t misread the data. Yes search is changing, it has been since it started. It would be a mistake to infer that this makes SEO irrelevant. Quite the contrary, the changes that Google is making strengthen their search results, which gives people greater confidence in the answers they find through Google, which means that more people will be searching.

Optimizing your website for search is more important now than ever. Frankly, it’s irresponsible to think otherwise.

Most of the Twitter birds that I found are vector based, but I also found a number of photographs of Twitter birds made in other media. There’s enough of a variety here to please any artistic taste. To find out who the artist is hover over the image and the credit will appear, or click on the image and you’ll be taken to the artist’s Flickr page, which shows more samples of their work.

I also found several that incorporate other media, which I think makes them interesting.

This next one is a little extra. It isn’t exactly a Twitter logo, but its still artistic and cool enough that it deserves to be in the list.

If you found this interesting, give us a shout on Twitter. @redmccombsmedia

Before discussing the differences it is important to understand the terms, so here are a few definitions.

DART is DoubleClick’s campaign administration tool and is one of the industry standard tools available today. Red McCombs Media uses DART for Advertisers to count the number of clicks a banner receives.

The term analytics refers to any web analytics package. Google Analytics is probably the most widely known, but the same information applies if you’re using Clicky, Omniture, WebTrends, Mint or any other.

A cookie is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by the browser, and may contain user preferences, referral information, or other data used by websites. Most web analytics packages, including Google Analytics, require the use of a cookie.

A publisher site is the site on which a banner or advertisement appears.

A landing page is the target webpage for a campaign.

A click is counted by DART when a person clicks on a banner or advertisement on a publisher’s site and is redirected to a landing page to find out more information about the promotion. This is in accordance with IAB click measurement guidelines. A click is not counted when a user interacts with the banner content in some way (expanding to find out more, retracting or closing an auto expandable, adjust volume levels, play a game within the banner, etc). And, a click is not counted when it is automated via a script or web crawler.  The only way a click is counted is if a person’s web browser exits the publisher’s site.

A visit is counted by analytics when a person interacts with a landing page through a web browser, and ends when the browser is closed or shut down. This term is interchangeable with the term session. A script or web crawler would not be counted as a visit, because they are not operating within a browser.

Because clicks and visits are two different metrics being measured by two different services across two different websites, it should come as no surprise that discrepancies exist between them. Regardless of the campaign it is unlikely that there will be a one-to-one correlation between clicks and visits, and in most cases the number of clicks will be greater than the number of visits.

There are a number of reasons for discrepancies between these two metrics. According to Google Analytics Help there are four explanations for a discrepancy between clicks reported by AdWords and visits recorded by analytics. Three of these four factors also apply to banner advertisements:

• A visitor may click on your ad multiple times. If a person clicks on your ad more than once during the same session, each click will be counted but Analytics recognizes each pageview as one visit. This is a common behavior for anyone that is comparison shopping. Multiple clicks equals one visit.
• A user may click on an ad, then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. In this case the referral information would be retained so one click would result in multiple visits. One click equals multiple visits.
• A visitor may click on an advertisement then click back, stop or close the browser before the page fully loads. In this case the click would be counted but Analytics would not record the visit. One click equals zero visits.

The issue of correlating clicks and visits becomes more complicated when searching within analytics.  It can be challenging to identify which visits are from a specific banner campaign. The easiest way to identify the campaign traffic is through referring sites. This is how most clients identify their campaign traffic. Yet, according to documentation within DART for Publishers (login required) this is an unreliable measurement. Because there are a number of ways for an ad to be implemented on a publisher’s website, analytics could report this traffic as being referred by the page where the ad is displayed or DoubleClick.com.

We at Red McCombs Media have even seen instances where the referral information is not passed at all. This can happen when a campaign banner is served by two or more ad servers, and the cookie is either corrupted or stripped. This is an artifact of the way that the banner for a campaign is distributed to publishers. In this case the click would be counted by DART and the visit would be counted by analytics, but it would not be attributed to a referring site at all.

For these reasons it is unlikely that the number of referrer visits will match the number of visits generated by a campaign, increasing the discrepancy between clicks and visits. There are, however, steps that can be taken to ensure that analytics counts as many visits as possible.

• Use Google’s URL Builder to tag the campaign. This ensures that all of the visits that are counted will be correctly segmented and labeled, making them easy to find. If you’re using something other than Google Analytics, there should be a similar means of campaign tracking available for that specific tool.
• Ensure that the same Analytics tracking code is installed on every page of the landing website. This ensures that if a visitor navigates to another page of the site it isn’t recorded as a bounce.

Note that even with these measures the number of visits will still not match the number of clicks.

Since any comparison between clicks and visits requires data from DART and analytics, how accurate is the data being reported by these services?

According to DART’s counting methodologies whitepaper (login required), their algorithm takes measures to prevent automated clicks and they are excluded from reports if detected. Over time this strategy has proven effective, very few clicks by real users are discarded, and once a user is identified as fraudulent all subsequent clicks are discarded.

Analytics packages are generally slightly less accurate when reporting the number of visits. As mentioned above, most analytics require the use of a cookie. Users have the option of blocking or deleting cookies and ad servers may also affect cookies. According to Brian Clifton, author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics and a whitepaper on the accuracy of analytics software, these factors lead to most analytics services (including Google Analytics) slightly under reporting the number of visitors. This would be in addition to the factors suggested by Google, increasing the discrepancy between clicks and visits.

Now that you understand the factors that contribute to a discrepancy, consider its magnitude. Our experience has shown that the size of the discrepancy between clicks and visits is different for each campaign. Because of this, it’s not safe to assume what the discrepancy should be before a campaign begins. Any assumption about what the discrepancy ‘should be’ is arbitrary at best.

Because of the discrepancies between clicks and visits, in our experience, a much more meaningful metric is the landing page conversion rate. This is the rate at which visitors to your landing page convert (complete a purchase, fill out a form, download a file, etc). While it is not possible to predict what the conversion rate will be before a campaign begins, once the data begins to appear there are a number of things that can be done to optimize the campaign to convert as many visitors as possible. By taking steps to optimize the conversion rate, advertisers can maximize the return on their advertising dollar. There are quite a few books available that cover the topic of landing page optimization. If you want to avoid all that reading, Red McCombs Media offers this as a service.

There are simply too many factors that contribute to discrepancies between clicks and visits for them to be considered the same, they are two different things measured by two different tools across two different domains. The supporting articles provided should show that the industry agrees. In short, this is not an actionable metric. Landing page optimization, on the other hand, is an effective means of evaluating the performance of a banner or search campaign. Do you agree or disagree with the conclusions drawn here? Please post questions or comments below.

In the coming weeks this blog will be updated with tips for optimizing the conversion rate of your campaign.

When Twitter took the web by storm, it was just natural that people would want to share photos there, and Twitpic was the answer. As much as I like sharing photos with friends, I couldn’t bring myself to use their service because Twitpic requires your Twitter credentials to play. So, each time I had a picture to share I’d post it to Flickr, shorten the URL and post it to Twitter. That’s a lot of steps and I’ll bet you can guess the outcome, I didn’t share many pictures via Twitter.

But now that’s all changed! Just yesterday Flickr launched a new service called Flickr2Twitter. It does exactly what it says, email a photo to a specific email address within your Flickr account, and it updates your Twitter account with a URL to the pic and your message. And, it handles this via Twitter’s API, so you get to keep your Twitter password to yourself.

Because you’re sending the pic via email, you can do all of this via your phone. Also, if you find a photo that’s already posted to Flickr (yours or a publicly available one), you can share the photo from directly within Flickr. That’s pretty handy.

Flickr, thanks for thinking of us. Stay awesome.

1. Mingle2 – In 2007 Matthew Inman (the former CTO of SEOmoz), designed and built the dating site Mingle2. Because of his previous experience with search engine optimization he knew the importance of inbound links, and he had the skills to boost his fledgling site through the likes of Google and Yahoo!. Within four months he generated nearly a quarter of a million links to the site and ranked #1 on Google for the phrases “online dating” and “free online dating.” This success earned him mentions on popular sites such as Digg and MSNBC.com, and generated nearly 2 million pageviews per month. Inman eventually sold the website to, and now works for JustSayHi. However cool Mingle2 is, it would have never succeeded this quickly (and in such a competitive market it may not have succeeded at all) apart from Inman’s skill in generating traffic through search engine optimization. The full story can be found on 0at.org.
2. San Diego Chiropractic – David Klein is the owner of a San Diego chiropractic firm, and when he saw the potential within Google he decided to try to rank for the term “san diego chiropractor.” He attended a couple of PubCon’s and learned some techniques for ranking well for search terms. He then got to work, transcribing the video of a Matt Cutts talk, and generating clever cartoons of some of the people he ran into at the event. These efforts have earned him more than 3,000 one way links and he has achieved his goal. More than two years later he’s still above competitors that have that search phrase in their domain! Matt Cutts was so impressed that he even blogged about Dr Klein’s success.
3. Automobile Recovery Bureau, Inc – This is a Houston auto repossession company that has been in business for more than 60 years and was looking for a boost in business. They contracted an SEO firm which helped them decide on a new domain, update their content and generated links to the site. The plan worked, within a year they ranked #1 for terms such as “houston repo” and “houston repossession.” They must have been pleased with the results because their SEO efforts began in 2002, and over the years they have done the work to maintain a #1 ranking for the targeted terms.
4. Falcon Storage – This is a Red McCombs Media client that leases storage containers in central Texas. In the summer of 2007 they launched a new website that generates quotes, has detailed information about their products, and the businesses which they serve. Six months later they expressed a desire for SEO, so we got to work keyword optimizing their site. Within two weeks they ranked #1 for such terms as “austin connex box” and “san antonio storage container.” The number of quotes generated by their website skyrocketed. Since then they’ve launched a blog, which has helped to solidify their strength in this market.
5. Southwest Airlines – Once again I have to include Southwest. I’m not a fanboy, but I do think that they get modern marketing at a level that eludes many other companies, and this is a great story. Southwest’s social marketing manager, Paula Berg, shared this last week at the Austin Online Marketing Summit. Every year the folks at Southwest’s headquarters, including the CEO, celebrate Halloween with a crazy costume. One year the CEO mentioned that he planned to dress as Gene Simmons. Someone commented that the CEO of USAir had donned that costume a few years ago, and after discussing it for a while they went to Google to prove it. They tried searches such as “doug parker gene simmons,” “usair halloween,” “doug parker costume” and anything else they could think of to find the answer. For every search term they tried, Nuts About Southwest was the top hit. They had blogged about halloween so much that their site was the top hit for terms directly about their competitor. Talk about success!

These are just five stories from a broad segment of businesses. There bottom line is that SEO works, and savvy companies across America are taking advantage of Google’s strength by working to appear for competitive search terms. Don’t be left out. If you think your company could benefit from search engine optimization, please contact us and we’ll discuss the possibilities with you.

1. FreshBooks – I’m going to start with my favorite example. FreshBooks is a web application that helps with invoicing for small companies. They created a Twitter account and began interacting with their clients and the Twitter community there. One night one of their customers tweeted that she had been stood up by a blind date. A FreshBooks employee saw the tweet, recognized that she was a customer, looked up her address and sent her a bouquet of flowers with a note that FreshBooks will never stand her up. The girl was so affected by this gesture that she told all of her friends, blogged about it, tweeted about it, shared the message via every medium that she could. People listened, and took note of FreshBooks. A year later they have an army of devoted supporters answering support questions and comments for them. Calls to their customer support line have gone down, saving them thousands of dollars each month. FreshBooks takes social marketing seriously and uses Twitter as a direct line with their customers, and its working for them. They have brand evangelists to show for it. Does your company have such fanatical support? If not, when was the last time you sent flowers to a client?
   
2. Dell – Dell computers has also had some Twitter success. Recognizing that Twitter was gaining momentum, they created an account to announce specials appearing in their outlet. They kept these specials separate from other marketing endeavors so they could track how Twitter is working for them. A year later they had produced $1M in sales through their Twitter account. This may not be a lot of money for one of the largest technology companies in the world, but keep in mind that the Twitter account didn’t cost them anything other than time. Do your customers know when you offer specials?
3. Attorneys – Let’s turn our attention away from Twitter for a little while. Last summer Michelle M. Friedman recommended to the other attorneys in her office that they connect with other professionals through LinkedIn. As soon as they started connecting with clients and associates new cases began coming in with little effort. They also bring in new business through answering questions in the answers section. How well are you connected with clients and professionals in your industry?
4. Masi Bikes – Tim Jackson is the sole marketer for this small, niche bike manufacturer. Working with a limited budget, he decided to start a company blog with podcast. Within two years sales doubled and Tim is now recognized as one of the people to keep up with in his industry. Even shop owners that don’t carry his brand read his blog because it is entertaining and informative. Do you keep up with trends in your industry? Do your clients and competitors?
5. Ford – Wanting to rebuild its name among young web savvy car buyers, Ford selected 100 people with YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts, gave them the new Fiesta to them free for six months with the stipulation that they share their experiences online. Here’s the kicker, Ford asked them to be honest about their experience, no boilerplate, no censoring, no editing. This certainly has the potential to blow up on them, but if successful they’ll have gone a long way toward establishing themselves as a quality brand among America’s young connected car buyers. So far its working in Ford’s favor, apart from the positive buzz about this marketing tactic the reviews are honest and favorable. Do you believe in your product or service enough to solicit public feedback?
6. Gretsch Guitars – Gretsch wanted to do something different to celebrate the company’s 125th anniversary. They decided to meet their customers where the were, on MySpace. They created an unsigned artist contest on the community site. The contest was a success. The Gretsch website earned an additional 55,000 visits within a couple of months, and fans have created their own Gretsch MySpace layouts, strengthening brand recognition. Would a contest stimulate interest in your brand?
7. Viewzi – Viewzi is a visual search engine. I could try to explain what that means but its easier for you to just click on the link, plus their site it unique enough that its worth seeing at least once. Social media guru Giovanni Gallucci was hired by the company to help with promoting the new brand. As Gallucci was going through his efforts, an acquaintance asked him a couple of questions about the site as well as for permission to write about it. Turns out the acquaintance regularly contributes to CNN, the very next day Viewzi was featured on CNN.com. That effort lead to feature stories on Wired, TechCrunch and several other prominent news sources. Within six months of launch the new company has a healthy stream of organic traffic and it is still growing. Are you connecting with everyone you can to spread the word about your company?
8. Zappos – This online retailer has been blogging and using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook almost since the company started. What’s interesting about Zappos is that while they openly embrace these social mediums, so much so that their employees are trained on how to use them, the executives don’t consider this a marketing effort. They call it a more personal connection with people, whether they are employees, customers or just fans of the company. This company doesn’t want to control the message, they want to connect with people. How refreshing! Zappos now has a fanatical group of brand evangelists, just as FreshBooks does. In your social media efforts are you more focused on selling something, or connecting with people?
9. CoffeeGroundz – This is a Houston coffee shop. Wanting to learn what social marketing was all about, the owner created a Twitter account and began having conversations with people there. One day a customer tweeted that he’d like to pre-order breakfast so that he could zip through the drive through. This one transaction got a lot of coverage because its recognized as the first to-go order on Twitter. The owner recognized the potential and began accepting orders via Twitter. This prompted even more attention, and today the coffee shop regularly hosts Houston Tweetups. This coffee shop used Twitter to double their clientele and generate a lot of buzz about the business. Would your customers feel comfortable asking for a new channel of communication? Would you respond if the did?
10. Southwest Airlines – This is a company that has followed its own path from the start, and this strategy has always worked for them. The company started its corporate blog in 2006, and since then has fully embraced social media with accounts at Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. They also have a weekly podcast. Each of these mediums requires effort, but the net effect is that their customers have many ways of interacting with the company. Customer initiated conversations have led to the company evaluating their position on boarding flights, assigned seating, advanced scheduling and other facets of their business. These are genuine conversations between decision makers within the company and the customers that value their service. This level of communication shows that the company is committed to their customers. Are your customers letting you know what’s working and what isn’t? Are you inviting that conversation?

Above are ten examples of companies that have directly impacted their bottom line through the use of social media. Small companies like CoffeeGroundz and independent attorneys are benefiting from social marketing as much as national brands like Ford and Dell. The bottom line is that there are as many ways of succeeding in social marketing as there are companies in America, and none of them have to cost a lot of money. In fact, in this list of examples it seems that creativity and genuine connections are more important than big budgets.

Don’t sit on the sidelines. Find someone in your company that loves and understands social media and ask them to help you connect with your clients. If that person doesn’t exist, then Red McCombs Media can help you.