In 2010 Your Small Business Should Look at SaaS Again

With Microsoft gearing up for another kick at the can in office suites, Office 2010, it is time to take a look at SaaS applications again. Why? Here are five reasons:

1. SaaS office tools stay current all the time. If you, like me, have gone through multiple Microsoft Office iterations then you know what it is like to pay over and over again for what turns out to be the same common functionality. SaaS applications, however, evolve with new functionality appearing from time to time.

2. The development of HTML 5 means that SaaS applications can run on your computer even when you are not connected to the Internet.

3. The new Chrome Operating System that Google recently made available to the software development community and that will become available in 2010 is a browser that is designed to support SaaS applications.

4. SaaS applications are better at securing your computer from malware because the documents, spreadsheets and slide shows you create are built in the cloud and not residing on your desktop.

5. SaaS email systems like Gmail are great spam filters saving you from having to invest in extra hardware to manage and block emails biggest pain.

So think about SaaS as a solution worth exploring and working with in 2010. Just yesterday I used Google Docs with a client to collaborate on a business plan. They were impressed at how easy it was to use, and how we could edit the document on the fly and see the results immediately with a simple screen refresh.

Where Companies are Marketing Focused These Days - the Internet

For 2010 it appears that business leaders are focusing on three marketing tactics that are all Internet based. Although traditional advertising is still something business is prepared to invest in, the hottest areas of growth are being devoted to email, social media and search.

Many companies are integrating their email and social media efforts but many others are still trying to figure out just how to make tweets and social network fan pages turn into new customers and more revenue.

In this study done by StrongMail, 42% of business leaders reported a lift in their marketing campaign performances after integrating social networking and email, but almost a quarter admitted that they had no clue as to how to measure the results of their integration efforts.

Only 5% of companies saw no value in integrating email and social networking. This research report supports the growing trend of companies to rethink the way they promote brands, whether through the Internet or through other more traditional advertising and marketing venues. Very few are ignoring social networking and micro-blogging because if they cannot see and measure the results, they certainly sense that there is something to this social media revolution.

Another Reason to Use Social Media to Create Visibility for Your Business on the Web

In my past blogs I have talked about creating Facebook presence for your business as a way to attract new customers, build a fan base, support causes and create increasing social awareness of your brand. But now there is another compelling reason to include Facebook in your online strategy.

Following on Bing and Yahoo's ability to create Facebook, MySpace and Twitter results, Google has announced a series of new features for its industry leading search engine. These features include the ability to get search results from popular public social networks and micro blogging sites.

Google has also added a really cool capability to its search engine, the ability to make searches sensitive to geography. This means if you are located in a particular city and making search queries, first page results will provide local sources of information. For retailers this has powerful implications.

This geographic search sensitivity reflects the growing use of smart phones for doing Internet search. Google has even created a Google window decal with a unique bar code known as a QR code which can be read by smart phones. The QR code is designed to have the same type of impact as a Michelin or Zagat sticker. When a phone scans the QR code, it displays important information about the retail site in Google search format results. That information could highlight specific merchandise, sales, services, menus, reviews and comments, and social media coverage.

BtoB Magazine Says Thought Leadership is the Number One Reason Why Companies Use Social Media

In business-to-business relationship management, or B2B as it is commonly known, U.S. companies are recognizing the power of social media strategies. Of 397 companies surveyed in the study done by BtoB Magazine, 60% indicated they were using social networks and other social media to establish thought leadership in their industry.

Thought leadership is all about establishing an organization's credentials through published articles, news, speeches, Webcasts, podcasts, videos, trade show and conference presence, and involvement in industry oversight or standards committees. The goal in the end is to establish trust and credibility with existing customers and prospects.

The tactics in building thought leadership include creating and maintaining company profiles on social media sites, doing micro-blogging (Twitter) and responding to customer comments on these sites, creating multiple blogs, monitoring when your company and competition are mentioned in social networks, contributing to discussions on non-company sites that have an industry focus, participating in social networking forums, creating company-associated causes and posting these within social networks, and creating company-sponsored social networking events.

Google Gives the Gears to Google Gears

Back in March 2008 I wrote an article about online Office tools. One of them was Google Gears. With the progression of cloud computing, the Google Chrome browser, and the emergence of a new HTML standard, Gears appears to no longer have a shelf life.

HTML5 is the new standard. It has been designed to solve the same problems that Gears was designed to fix. HTML5 has become a Web standard. Even Microsoft with its penchant for proprietary solutions has jumped on this bandwagon.

Linus Upson, Google's engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, states, "This isn't an area we've been investing a lot in the last year since we launched Chrome. We're very focused on making HTML5 as successful a standard as possible."

Google intends to continue to support Gears for existing customers. What made Gears so attractive was its ability to allow users to operate Web applications and store the data from them when not connected to the Internet. Gmail and Google Docs were two Google applications that I tested and used this way. But lately Google has been demonstrating offline Gmail using HTML5. And now Google is building this functionality into its Chrome browser. Safari is using HTML5 to create similar functionality. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer, such as IE6 cannot support HTML5 so users of that browser will find themselves out of luck.

Social Media Marketing Central to Fastest Growing Companies - Isn't it About Time Your Small Business Invested in this Medium?

Over 90% of the 100 fastest growing companies in the U.S. are using social media in their marketing strategies according to the Center for Marketing Research, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. More than half of the companies surveyed were tweeting. This is a remarkable uptake and reflects a significant change in behaviour as the companies surveyed recognize the power of social media to reach customers.

The change over the last two years has been remarkable. In 2007, 43% of the 500 companies surveyed were not invested in social media as a marketing strategy. Today only 9% have not at least adopted one social media strategy.

The study which included 148 of Inc. 500’s fastest growing companies was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Director of the Center, and researcher Eric Mattson. The chart to the left illustrates the growth in use of social networking, blogging, and Twitter with a decline in podcasting, bulletin boards and online video. When those surveyed were asked to gauge the success rate of their investment in social media, they reported an 82% success rate for Twitter and 87% using other social networking tools.

Nora Barnes states, “While so many things are leveling off, social networking and blogging remain strong, showing businesses are continuing to immerse themselves in social media and blogging even while others are getting cut back.” Barnes believes companies recognize the low to no-cost of using social media to promote products and services, often requiring no more than a small group from various departments within the organization to interact with customers. “Social media is the only thing I know that you can talk to a customer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, a portal created between a consumer and a provider that allows constant and open discussion....If there is a problem, it can be immediately taken care of, making it easier to to address issues. Consumers like it and businesses like it because things don’t fester. Social media allows things to be handled quickly,” Barnes states.

The study reports that 68% of the companies interviewed are listening to hear what people in social networks are saying about their brands and business. That represents a significant increase from 2007 when only 50% were paying attention to what people were saying. Barnes remarks, “you shouldn’t only be talking on social media, you should be listening as well.”

The types of social media activities that these up and coming companies have engaged in over the last two years are listed below in order of use.

• Wikis - 92%
• Message & Bulletin Boards - 91%
• Podcasts - 89%B
• Blogs - 88%
• Social Networks - 87%
• Online Videos - 87%
• Twitter - 82%
  

Adding Web Video to Your Marketing Efforts Pays Off

Putting a video on your website can be a powerful tool to engage customers and prospects. A recent Eyeblaster Research study shed insight on website visitor behaviour with and without video. Videos make customers stick longer.

Dwell rates with video on a website are significantly higher. Video increases the likelihood that a site visitor will hang around longer by as much as 20 to 50%. See the table below:











So looking a video as a strategy in populating your web content makes a lot of sense. Short videos are far more effective than long ones. A summary of the study's findings include:

• Video growth has outpaced Rich Media growth by 60% in the last three and a half years.

• Video increases Dwell Rate by 20% and doubles Dwell Time.

• The ROI on video ads is double that of non-video Rich Media ads.

• Video outperforms in the news, sports, music and finance sections and lags in social networks and games environments.

• Rollover user-initiated video performs best, followed by auto-initiated video

• Click user-initiated performs worst

• Weekdays from 9am to 5pm is the users’ preferred time to watch

• An increase of video length by five seconds reduces video fully played rates by 2.8%, on average.

In the study Eyeblaster forecasts video web advertising to grow from $1.1 billion in 2009 to more than $4 billion by 2013.

A recent survey done by Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic found that only 21% of the people watching DVR
playback and 30% of people watching TV airtime pay attention to commercials, compared to 46% of people watching in-stream video ads online.

So what conclusions can you draw from these research results?

1. Videos on your website work.
2. The shorter they are the more likely they will be watched from beginning to end.
3. People will pay attention to a video ad on a website far more than one on television.
4. Videos on social media sites are less effective than on your company website.
5. Videos are far more effective than static ads or display banners on websites.
6. Autoplay beats click to watch.