This simply underlines the value of using the internet for business transactions. Even more, it highlights how improtant this will be during an economic downturn.

As John Walker, the FSB National Policy Chairman, says:

“The number of small businesses who have their own website has grown over the past two years, which indicates that small firms are becoming increasingly internet-savvy. Despite the onset of an economic downturn, all small firms should look to the internet to maximise their sales and increase efficiency.”

The FSB report is called Putting the economy back on track: Transport, Environment and ICT and was written by Professor Oswald Jones and compiled by the University of Glamorgan.

As a final comment on the way that businesses are now turning to the internet, the report reveals that the number of small businesses who now have their own web site has increased by a quarter to around 70 per cent since the last survey.

Businesses who are still deciding whether the internet is something in which they should be investing energy, focus, or finance take note. Your competitors are doing it and they will be gaining market share.

Primarily aimed at webmasters, if you’re prepared to roll up your sleeves and make some minor and (in most cases) straightforward changes to your web site, you’ll find the guide to be a great help and a useful resource even if you don’t know how to develop a web site. The guide offers this description on the importance of SEO:

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them.

The guide includes the following sections, each containing a concise overview introducing the topic, clear examples showing the techniques in use, and a guide to good practices - including what to avoid:

• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Make use of the “description” meta tag
• Improve the structure of your URLs
• Make your site easier to navigate
• Offer quality content and services
• Write better anchor text
• Use heading tags appropriately
• Optimize your use of images
• Promote your website in the right ways
• Take advantage of web analytics services

If you don’t feel like getting your hands dirty with what goes on under the bonnet of your web site, being familiar with what goes into making an optimised site is still a great idea. You could always treat the guide as a checklist for how well your site measures up, or refer to it when hiring in a company to develop or modify your site. If your web site is important to your business, being able to perform your own web site health-check, without the need to call in the experts, will pay huge rewards to your web presence and give you an idea of where you need to invest precious time and resource.

If you think your site is failing to measure up, or think you don’t have enough of the guide’s suggestions in place, Google have also put together some helpful tips for hiring an SEO company, so you can make sure your making the right decision when calling in the experts to fix it for you.

You can read Google’s announcement on their webmaster blog, and grab the Google SEO Starter Guide here.

Wiggly Wigglers is a small, Herefordshire based company, operating out of some farm buildings, who are passionate about the gardening products they supply. They have successfully built, and are maintaining, an on-line strategy that includes regular blogging, weekly podcasting, and an active Facebook group.

By adopting social media, and placing it at the core of their marketing strategy, Wiggly Wigglers have reported that their business:

• Serves 90,000 customers worldwide and delivers its products across Europe;
• Cut its advertising budget by 80 percent when the company turned to social media over traditional advertising;
• Built its catalogue based on Wiki ideas generated on its Facebook page by experts and customers.

Congratulations to the team at Wiggly Wigglers, a brave decision to embrace the Web and communicate openly and honestly with their customers is clearly paying massive benefits (not to mention £25,000 worth of Dell products and services!).

Idil Cakim posted back in April on the Next Fifty Years blog, about how Wiggly Wigglers are doing social media the right way - Wiggly Wigglers: Gardening through Social Media - and summarises their on-line activity with a glowing reference, and a great checklist for others looking at marketing on-line:

There is a dotted line between being Heather’s podcast listener, blog reader and Wiggly Groupie on Facebook and becoming her customer. Heather is doing several things right from a social media marketing standpoint:

- She has a strong voice. It’s genuine and personable.
- She is passionate about what she writes.
- She informs and educates her customers.
- She offers applicable tips.
- She keeps in touch.
- She encourages product trials with discounts and give-aways.
- Her products have a social angle—they make the world greener.
- She welcomes new friends.

Wiggly Wigglers should be an essential case study, worth, er, studying, for any business looking at enhancing their web presence through social media. If you are considering implementing a social media strategy, making sure you can happily (and honestly) place a tick next to at least 6 of the above tips, will prove a solid foundation for your efforts.

A good example is Foneshop.com, which is one of the UK’s leading online mobile phone retailers. When they launched their web site in 2003, they managed about 10 orders a day, according to the company’s Group Marketing Director, David Hyett. Their goal was to reach 100 orders a day. By using an AdWords campaign in conjunction with SEO techniques and landing page optimization, Foneshop.com has seen its total orders rise by about 56% and, more importantly, the average value of each order has risen by 54%. They invest about 60% of their monthly advertising budget in AdWords. The result? Over half of their customers find Foneshop.com through Google and the conversion cost per customer has decreased by 29%.

In stark contrast to this, research by Microsoft last year estimated that UK small businesses are spending £3 billion annually on invisible web sites. In a survey of 400 UK SMBs, the research uncovered that

“44% of SMBs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated.  However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales.”

It’s no surprise, though, that companies that do ‘get it’ are choosing to switch from paper-based advertising campaigns to online marketing. And those that do are reaping the benefits, not only of being first to exploit the potential of reaching a wider market for less cost, but also of grabbing the kudos of being environmentally friendly.

The statistics seemed to give Obama the edge with numbers for YouTube views, Facebook friends, Blog mentions etc much larger than those of his opposition, John McCain. I suggested it would be fascinating to see analysis surface about the effect of Obama’s on-line campaign, if Obama was to win the election. Well, he did, and there has.

ReadWriteWeb have posted an article which references some data collected by Trendrr (I think that 2 ‘r’s at the end of the name future proofs them, ready for web 3.0!). The article - Obama’s Social Media Advantage - although it’s no proof that Obama’s on-line engagement helped him win the election, it does show that Obama had some 500 million mentions on the Blogosphere in the last 10 weeks or so, compared to McCain’s 150 million (although these mentions may have been positive or negative). The data also points to a huge amount of extra engagement in the days leading up to the polls - with Obama gaining more than 10,000 new followers on Twitter, and McCain just 924 (OK, I know that’s 920 more than I have in total, but still!!)

Again, it’s difficult to see how much impact the campaigns had on these figures, but it is clear that Obama managed to cause many, many more conversations, and I’d be very, very surprised if his on-line activity didn’t feed this. I’m sure that by using on-line engagement, a greater web visibility, and the ability to create a story worth talking about, Obama has managed to drive conversations.

The article finishes with a statement which should resonate with all organisations which deal with the public - not just election campaigns:

…looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril.

I’ll keep an eye (or an RSS net) out for any further analysis on the Obama campaign, and any more direct correlation between his on-line engagement and his election win. How much impact did the on-line campaign have and how much will this trend change for the next election, or elections in other countries?

What do you think about Obama’s on-line campaign: how much of the success can be attributed to social media, and more importantly for social marketing in business: how can this be measured?

UPDATE: Several other websites have recently posted summaries of Obama’s on-line campaign, most notably the BBC.co.uk - with Online lessons for UK in Obama win, and Guardian.co.uk - with Obama’s win means future elections must be fought online.

So please bear with me while I indulge myself with another (great) list about how to get the most from LinkedIn, this time by Brian Wallace of Mashable - How to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Brian lists seven LinkedIn features that most businesses could benefit from using:

Quick Lookup - Look up who you are having that next business meeting with. You’ll be able to break the ice right away.

Q&A - Post questions to others in your industry. The Yahoo Answers look and feel of this feature has definitely made LinkedIn more active and interesting. A public question can be responded to by anyone that works in really any discipline. Such was the case where Derek Edmond spotted a discussion occurring about the trustworthiness of SEO.

Recommendations - Have clients or co-workers post recommendations, which future employers and clients can view to gauge your skill and level of trustworthiness. Conversely, if you’re an employer, these imply trustworthiness for a potential freelancer or new hire.

Background checks - Look up potential new hires or freelancers. This should be right up there in an HR manager’s toolbelt.

See what your competition is up to - Keep track of what others in your industry are up to. Network updates gives you a feed of recent activity, so you can see who your connections have friended, groups they have joined, and the people they have recommended. You’ll even be able to see when people are switching jobs.

Introductions - Use people you already know to help make introductions. It’s a great way to get in the door with a company you need to contact.

Open Networking - Go out and become a LION! You are an open networker.

Brian also links to a great post by Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide about why LinkedIn is the one social network she would always recommend - the post gives some compelling, real world examples of the power of using LinkedIn. A great read for those who are unsure whether to bother investing their time and energy into the LinkedIn network.

So, there you have it. Even more reasons why LinkedIn could be good for you, and your business. And yes, I promise not to go on about LinkedIn for a while…

So there you have a picture of marital and bucolic bliss. (Not that we live in the countryside but it’s only a short walk away.) And, of course, that is not the point of this post.

Getting to the point
On the walk back home my wife asked me about one of the bpodr proposals we sent out last week. My wife runs a successful company. bpodr recently helped the company revamp its web site. In addition, we’ve devised a strategy for increasing site traffic, helping the company expand into other markets, and set up a personal blog (and blogging strategy) for my wife. She’s well aware, then, of the benefits of the internet tools available to businesses of all sizes.

And yet, if I mention the term ’social media’ she guffaws. She snorts. She jeers and mocks. In short, she laughs. To her ears, ’social media’ is an ‘airy-fairy’ term. ‘It sounds as if it was made up to sound important,’ she says. ‘It’s an empty phrase. What does it mean?’

What’s in a name?
What indeed? This raises a couple of questions. Firstly, what is to be gained by collecting a number of internet tools and giving them a label of any sort, never mind one that has intelligent business people sniggering behind their hands? Secondly, how do people expert in these tools and passionate about the benefits they bring convey the impact they can have on a business without resorting to the ‘airy-fairy’?

(A quick aside: if you haven’t read this Dennis Howlett guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog and the huge number of responses it generated, please give it a visit. Although much of the discussion was about the take-up of the technology, there were a significant number of comments on the terminology itself. I think it will prove to be one of those posts which will be seem to mark the start of a sea-change in ’social media’ thinking. And by ‘post’ here, I include the comments - a good post is really only as good as the conversation it inspires.)

In most cases, there is a technological divide between companies of a certain size and the enterprise. The latter usually has the budget and staff - although perhaps in shrinking numbers at the moment - to allow a bit of boundary pushing, testing, and breaking when it comes to the sharp edge of internet innovation. Smaller businesses, however, are by nature and necessity slow to the curve. They need proof that any expenditure will satisfy at least a minimum ROI before they write cheques.

What are we measuring?
Terminology doesn’t often win over business owners. It’s usually about the bottom line and for companies trying to deliver services to these business owners, being unable to offer hard evidence for success and hiding behind what can, at times, appear to be condescending jargon, is not a recipe for a successful sale.

Griping about the difficulty of measuring ROI or complaining that revenue growth is hard to equate directly with increased web site traffic or asserting that the value of reputation cannot be counted in pound coins does little to instil confidence in the tools we propose to use. Surely it is up to us who hope to use the tools to be able to define exactly how the customer will benefit.

If it’s hard to measure something, it comes down to one of two reasons. Either we’re measuring the wrong thing or we’re using the wrong tool to measure it.

This goes for our set of tools, too. Hide behind a vacuous term and you don’t deserve a client’s business. Tell the client you can work wonders for the business but it will be hard to put that in hard numbers and watch while security arrives at the door.

comScore… a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of blog visitation in the U.K. examining the top blog platforms and individual blogs as ranked by total U.K. visitors. In August, 14.5 million people in the U.K. visited at least one blog, representing 41 percent of the total U.K. Internet audience.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” said Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director, comScore Europe. “They live and breathe in real-time, helping quench media consumers’ thirst for the most up-to-date breaking news, information, and analysis. It should not, therefore, be particularly surprising that they’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie.”

14.5 million people - 41%. These are large numbers, and act as a compelling argument that Blogging is healthy and well, and living in the UK.

Although an argument could be made about how long each visitor stayed, or how many pages they viewed, it is hard to ignore that Blogging is establishing itself as a credible mainstream media platform.

How is your business helping to quench the thirst of an ever-increasing number of blog visitors in the UK?

If you have a LinkedIn profile, check out the Wordpress app here.

LinkedIn apps have just been released this week - a little like Facebook apps, but for grown-ups! (no poking here). There are only a handful of applications available at the moment, but I expect more will follow soon. I’m sure we’ll see some real innovative applications appearing over the coming weeks.

A couple of interesting apps available now for your profile:

• The My Travel app let’s you see who’s traveling where within your network - meet up for a cocktail, perhaps, before that big meeting.
• Google Presentation allows you to embed powerpoint slideshows into your profile - great for giving people a little more of you, or your latest project or pitch. (Just make sure you follow the golden rules of powerpoint)

“We’ve been planning a revamp but it’s just not a priority at the moment.”

OR

“It’s just a token site. None of our customers are on-line, anyway.”

Got to love a token site. Perhaps this is a company that also does:

• token customer service;
• token business cards;
• token delivery vans;
• token packaging;
• token products.

If I buy from them, will they send me a token invoice?

Who’s Counting Your Tokens?

When I was a wee boy in Edinburgh, we used tokens to pay for our milk. Once a month I would go with my mother to the basement of the big Co-Op and stand around while she bought a set of tokens. I loved it in there: they had those great pneumatic message tubes, which would carry cash and receipts to and from the sales counters to the accounting office. Every morning, we would place a number of tokens in an empty washed milk bottle and put it outside. In return, we would get that number of full milk bottles.

You’ll understand why I get sentimental about tokens. The milk tokens of my childhood, however, had intrinsic value. The token web site, in comparison, has none. In fact, it’s true to say that, like a reputation black hole, the token web site is in danger of sucking your prospective customer’s every good intention into a singularity. The singularity of No Sale!

I would go as far as to say that No Site is better than a Token Site. At least a prospective customer can fall back on his or her imagination. Confronted by the full horror of your grisly web presence, however, it’s hard to construct a business case solely on the clever way you make me scroll through a lot of home page copy that says a lot about how your company was doing four years ago.

So, if you can’t really be bothered with a web site that presents your company in its best light, at least make your token something valuable. Give them a reason to follow up via phone or email. Make it a one page site that lures rather than distresses.

None Of My Customers Have Internet Access

Really? That’s an increasingly niche market to work in. Of course, that’s probably not what you meant when you said your customers were not on-line. I guess you meant that they didn’t use the web as a business tool.

Not yet. But, as they browse a few fun sites like YouTube and check the football results via the BBC, who knows when they may get the urge to search for some business information. It’s human nature to explore and pretty soon they’ll be looking for new services and prices and terms of business. That’s when they find a competitor with a site that is not in need of a revamp and is very much the opposite of token.

What then?

Ignoring Your Web Site Does Not Save Money

Revamping your web site and establishing a creditable on-line presence may seem like an expensive option at a time when cash flow is becoming less and less dependable. But this is exactly when you need to ramp up sales, establish your market leadership, and ensure that customers, prospects, employees, and shareholders see mention of the company name as often as possible on-line.

It may be hard to pin down accurate ROI for a web presence that meets your business objectives but it’s sure as hell a lot more cost-effective than traditional interruption marketing in trade mags and other print outlets with declining readership.

If you’re in a niche market where you believe that few of your customers inhabit the web, then all the better. For a start, you’ll probably discover new customers. It also gives you the perfect opportunity to define the way the web is used for your business sector.

Frankly, if your site needs revamping and you think it’s just not worth doing, you may as well close your doors and send the staff home now. Because your future sales are out there.

And they’re looking for more than mere tokens.