SE Reputation Management For Direct Response Cost Savings

People talk about search engine reputation management (SERM) like it only serves to hide nasty blog articles dated from 2 years before you settled the class action. I’ve noticed this for a while – but never seen it blogged – that savvy companies could use similar SERP-domination techniques for direct response. Specifically, they could save money on coupons.

Let’s imagine how SERM can save you money.

Suppose you’re Mac Cosmetics. Suppose further that your checkout process prompts people for a coupon.

Guess what 90% of people do?

They google ‘Mac cosmetics coupon’ . Or ‘promo code for Mac Makeup’ or whatever combination of (i) “money off” terminology your checkout asks for and (ii) your brand and variations on it.

What happens next?

They find an affiliate coupon publisher site. They click the link to ‘reveal the coupon code’.

And then?

If you’re lucky, all that’s going to cost you is the discount plus the commission
for the affiliate that contributed NOTHING to generating the sale…

Or perhaps you don’t give affiliate coupons, so it just costs you for the discount.

But that’s unlikely. Because clever affiliates can use the ‘click to reveal discount’ call to action combined with a “site is loading” page after that. The click-to-reveal button cookies your visitor and the ‘loading page’ isn’t there to ask for patience but really to just reveal the non-affiliate coupon. Depending on your tracking, that cookie may mean paying the affiliate even if the coupon isn’t part of the affiliate channel.

If you’re unlucky, what that is going to cost you is the entire sale. The visitor just browsed your site for 5 minutes to find the product, add to cart, go through 90% of your checkout… It’s not a sure thing they’ll do it over for a 10% discount or free shipping.

So what is this notorious “that” in the phrase, “that is going to cost you”?

“That” is a failure to use reputation management to rank your own site and pages for “Brand + coupon” queries.

Facebook users are loyal, just like your pet dog

*Blows dust of keyboard*

Its been a long time since i blogged here. Its kinda weird ya know, if i get a nice little run going then i really get into blogging, but if i stop for a month or so whilst i am trafficking small children across the globe it kind of ruins my stride.

Silly jokes aside though, i just read a post on Mashable which reaffirms what I have been saying for ages when i have been championing technologies like Facebook connect. Users who visit your site from Social Media websites are loyal and they will return, why? Because they probably found your site through a friends recommendation, and people are friends because they have things in common, well either that or they have lots a chocolate chip cookies that they like to give out.

Since i am lazy and i have said all i want to say at 17:24 on a Tuesday afternoon, i am just going to quote the Mashable post about this…

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analysed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.

loyalty-chitika

So just remember, it is always worth having a presence on social media sites, just make sure you do it properly.

Wanna build social media apps without the code?

Well now you can with Zembly πŸ™‚

Zembly

What the hell is Zembly may you be asking? Well according to their website…

Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

At Zembly, you can easily and instantly…

  • author social applications using your browser
  • participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
  • use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
  • publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

So as you can see Zembly gives you a way to generate applications for a number of platforms without having to learn the code for each of the said platform. So how do you go about actually creating them?

Basically you have an online editor which allows you to take sample code snippets from other projects that people have made and then insert them into your application. For example you may be trying to work out how you can build a voting system, you would search using the inbuilt search function for “voting” and then it would return you all the code snippets which you could then plug straight into your application.

Once you have your application built you can then save it onto the Zembly server so you don’t even have to sort out hosting or setting up your server to handle applications. Once done you can submit your app’s to say, Facebook and watch the millions of $$$ roll on in πŸ™‚ You can already check out a Facebook application which has been made using Zembly called Capitol Punishment, as you can see it is pretty robust.

Zembly is currently in private beta so keep an eye on their site for when it comes available.

iPhoto 09 integrates with Facebook Connect

Well Mac fans, here is some interesting news from Apple today. It seems that iLife 09 (which includes such software as iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band etc etc) will have a rather useful plugin for iPhoto 09 which will allow users to upload their snaps directly to Facebook by using the incredibly useful Facebook Connect.

You should know by now that i am a very big fan of Facebook Connect and it is great to see that it is now being implemented directly in programmes along side web sites and web applications.

Apparently the user will have full control of the privacy of the image settings whilst in iPhoto, and then they just simply hit a button to upload and away you go.

You can check out the video over at apple.com to see more or find out more information about Facebook Connect by visiting the Facebook Category here on my blog

Facebook Connect signup now open

Last week i wrote quite a comprehensive post about Facebook Connect and how you can use it on your site. I also showed some quick steps on how you can implement it into your site.

Well now Facebook have opened up the signup process which means that you can go and register your site and hopefully get it approved. It is expected that the approval process could take a little bit of time, and also not all sites are guaranteed to be accepted.

I expect that as more and more sites come on board the process will actually become a little more streamlined just like the application approval process which generally takes about 24hrs.

Head over to the Facebook Connect signup page to err, sign up πŸ™‚