Seasons greetings and best wishes for 2010 to you all! I thought I would share some of my thoughts about Marketing on the internet in 2009 and give you my outlook for 2010.

1) (No surprises) the web in 2009 has provided an escape hatch for companies struggling to market through traditional physical channels due to the opportunity to reduce costs, its accessibility and pervasiveness. We've seen this in numerous examples this year from:

Stores abandoning high-street outlets in favour of eBay;
The exponential growth of wealthy consumers in web purchases;
The drop in TV advertising revenues while Online advertising revenues remained in growth throughout 2009 (have you seen Sky TV's latest advert "Brands take off on TV?" It is a direct reaction to this issue.);
Startups exploiting the cheaper UK £ pound and lower VAT by launching websites aimed at selling UK goods throughout Europe. Propositions have ranged from car spares to grocery deliveries!

2) The stats suggest the rise has not been to the advantage of web-only merchants, interestingly, but have benefitted existing consumer brands and companies offering a mix of channels - e.g. a shop, the telephone and the web.

(So 2009 has not seen a web revolution, but a reorganisation of factors of production into greater utility order. Use the web where it is strong.)

3) Social networking takes the prize for generating the most noise, whilst not necessarily the most value. Unequivocally here to stay in some form or other, I hope Social network usage in 2010 consolidates, clarifies and matures. The deciding factors I hope will be:

Continued integration between sites with different strengths (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg) and a shakeout of the many "me too" sites that add noise and subtract value;
Better usability (oh, please! These sites are acting their age at the moment);
Clarification whether these sites exist to promote valid social comment (e.g. Pressure against the Iranian election results on Twitter or "Rage against the machine" Vs Simon Cowell on Facebook) versus ill-hidden egotism "look at me looking at this" (such as the American soldier Twittering the progress of the Fort Worth army base shootings, sensationalising and mis-representing what was going-on in the process).

4) Copy-cat, uninspiring, badly constructed, websites that use slow ISPs and nobody links-to will remain amongst the 97% of unmitigated rubbish on the internet that nobody finds. If you have a good, unique, focussed business idea and your website respects the rules of the internet, judiciously links to others and uses a high-performing ISP, then the considerable search engine changes that have gone on in 2009 will promote your business.

The appearance of "Bing.com" (Microsoft's come-back to the search engine market) has helped - not hindered - this process, challenging long-established highly linked sites that have enjoyed good search results on Google to "wake-up" and look at their content.

5) Late in 2009 Google signalled how important performance really is. Always considered "a factor" in good search rankings, the recent appearance of diagnostic tools in Googles Webmaster toolkit signals a sea-change in how fast a site must load for it to rank well. This not only reinforces the need to employ knowledgeable people to construct and maintain your websites - I think it will cause a shakeout in poor performing ISPs - who have hitherto been able to "hide" behind slow service. These new tools help you pinpoint exactly where performance issues lie.

6) Internet scamming in 2009 has remained - and in 2010 will remain - prolific just as long as people believe:

They can get something for nothing, instantly;
Merely being on the web somehow showers a poor proposition with pixie dust;
There is a possibility of exposed flesh, divine intervention, instant health or instant wealth;
That "passing on this message to 50 friends" really will bring you good luck;
Paying money and giving away important personal information to complete strangers without a moment's further research is OK on the web.

Sites of interest this month

We have been involved with the following sites this month:

Higha-Efficiency

Advanced renewable heating solutions

Higha Efficiency is a supplier of energy-saving heaters - interestingly not Infra-Red - thus avoiding a conflict of interests on my part with Green Energy (and, indeed, opening up the possibility of dialogue between the two). They have asked me to review their web optimisation with a view to possibly helping them with this in the early new year. For more information, check out "Advanced renewable heating solutions" at http://www.higha-efficiency.com.

Legacy Habitat Management

Legacy Habitat Management

Legacy Habitat Management provides environmental consultancy, contracting services and equipment for construction projects. This is consequently a very interesting proposition whose time is long past due.

We are delighted to have been asked to help manage their online Sponsored-click advertising strategy starting in the new year. Have a look for yourselves at the range of environmental services they offer at http://www.legacy-habitat.co.uk and http://www.wildlifefencing.co.uk.

Fred's leads

Fred has been busy pursuing clients in two target markets in Australia and we did a small piece of work to help the thinking along on one of them. Winning a client in one of these markets would break new ground for PPC advertising. As this proposition is "all-new" it is a question of finding the right "entry level" message to grab the target client's attention and get them properly engaged. Others should then follow. Easy words to use! We all know how difficult this sometimes is in practice! Fred may be "close" with one client. Can't tell you more. Really hope it works in the New Year. http://www.fredsleads.com.

Green Energy

Infrared heaters

We have done a lot of work recently in two areas for this proposition: one was to "listen" to what the analytics were suggesting about the site and modify - reasonably extensively - the site structure and navigation to suit the way people were clicking around the site. If you haven't visited the site recently, have a look at how we have opened it up.

The other aspect of our work has been on link-building which has been going very well and we have 80 or so links now from 50 different sites.

Green Energy themselves have now hired a PR consultant Helen Oldfield from Affinity PR to assist their marketing, trade show and media leverage. This is a very exciting development as the industry positions itself for the spring trade fairs season we'll be positioning the wide array of web assets we now have behind those messages. See:

http://www.greenenergy-eu.com
http://www.infrared-heating-redwell.co.uk
http://www.infrared-heating.blogspot
http://twitter.com/radiantinfrared/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Green-Energy-Eu/166799959703

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