Today, online marketing means not only being where your customers are, but also knowing the right ‘amount.’ Being on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are all great, but for consumers, it can sometimes be overwhelming. Remember that the goal of online marketing and social media isn’t to bombard customers and fans with your products and promotions. Just how no one likes pop-up advertisements and rarely go back to sites that have them, customers and fans will lose interest and more importantly trust in your brand if you are overpowering them with your message.

Successful social media and online marketing campaign should always do two things: Listen and Learn.

Why You Need To Listen

In school, the importance of listening skills are repeated over and over. Whether it’s lecture or a business meeting, listening to what others have to say is extremely important. With that said, listening to what your customers or fans are saying is extremely important. Ignoring what your market is saying about you is essentially turning your back on those that made you who you are.

For companies, the success of marketing campaigns are based on dollars and cents. With the evolution of online marketing though, this may all change. Because of the open communication lines online, consumer sentiment has a huge part in the success of products, campaigns, and brands. A great example of this is the impact that users on Twitter had on the highly controversial movie, ‘Bruno.’ In an industry that thrives off word of mouth advertising, Twitter users who voiced their negative opinions about the movie in turn dissuaded others from watching it. During that weekend, negative reviews of Bruno were rampant on Twitter and Facebook. Although the opening weekend was a huge success, the subsequent days following it were nothing short of disappointing. Could this have been avoided? Absolutely. Not only were critics uneasy about the content of the movie, but in the months leading up the movie, Facebook and Twitter users voiced their feelings about leaked content of the movie.

Learn

Aside from listening to what your online community is saying, learning from them is also a key component to online marketing. Studying trends and how audiences react to content is extremely important. Through empirical evidence, organization should always be aware of how markets, fans, and customers are affected by trends and changes. A great example of this is when Facebook decided to change their site design early last year. Although there appeared to be huge animosity toward it, statistics showed that there was actually a drastic jump in site traffic and registration that remained constant after the new site design. Remember that you should never take what’s on the surface and to always dig deep. Online marketing is not just about having great content and pushing it out there for the online world. It involves constant change and the ability to re-invent your campaign at any moment and still remain relevant.

As more and more companies continue to leave store-front businesses in exchange for e-commerce sites, one important question that these businesses must ask themselves is if they really understand their customers. While it is easy to say you made a hundred sales in one month, the more important question is why your customers chose to buy your products and how you can replicate the same results.

With user information becoming increasingly valuable, being able to understand your customers behaviors, trends as well as likes and dislikes can be the key to whether or not you have a successful business.

The Importance of Data

As a business, each and every user that visits your website forms a relationship with you. Some may be long-lasting, while others may be one time ‘flings.’ Whether it’s long-lasting or not, understanding the reasons behind this is important. By capturing visitor data, businesses can learn how to better improve both their marketing and product development.

On the marketing side, by analyzing data to find correlations between purchases, you can determine how you should proceed as far as allocating funds for online advertisements, adwords, and how items are presented to visitors. Additionally, product development can benefit from knowing specifics such as what accessories are most often purchased with certain purchases as well as how often users come back to buy a particular type of item.

Lower Bounce Rate, Increase Relevance

Aside from being able to better tailor your website to your customers individual preferences, knowing how customers interact with your website will allow you to best optimize your site for when a customer lands on your site for the first time. For example, if you know that 90% of users scroll down and click on the About Us tab, by moving the About Us to the top of your website you are increasing the chance that they will stay on your site since they don’t have to search around for it. Too often are website content with leaving things the way they are out of their own convenience which means they are missing out on potential sales.

When a consumer first arrives at your website, you typically only have between 1-3 minutes to ’show’ them something relevant to what they are looking for. If you don’t, the chances of them coming back your website are drastically lower.

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While it may seem difficult, there are many tools out there that enable you to understand your customers and allow you to optimize your site in real-time. Being able to tell others how much money you made is great, but being able to tell them how and why is even better.

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Joseph Yi is the Director of Marketing at Viralogy.com and works in social media and sports consulting. Find more about him on his website.

“Have you heard? John and Mary broke up.”

“How do you know?”

“She just updated her Facebook”

Believe it or not, this is how many people today find out about break ups and new relationships. With just a few clicks, you can make it ‘official.’

As Facebook continues to grow in both size and influence, more and more people are making their relationships public. While by no means is it a requirement to state who you are dating or if the relationship is ‘complicated,’ Facebook users feel the need to share it with others.

Facebook: Reality?

I remember once when someone told me that if it wasn’t on Facebook, it wasn’t official. While this may be just a saying, the truth is that Facebook has done such a good job of representing real-life relationships online, that for some, reality and online blur together.

While Facebook is far from close to replacing real-life relationships, perhaps this is the future of social networking sites. When you look at the success of online dating networks like eHarmony and Match.com, both of which have over 20 million registered users, the foundation of their success is rooted in their ability to leverage online connections and transform them into real ones.

A user on eHarmony doesn’t know what their potential ‘match’ looks like in person, but can develop an idea from pictures, video, and basic profile information. Similarly, on Facebook it is not uncommon for individuals to be friends with people they have never met before in person, yet converse and network with them as if they have.

While the comparison was made to dating networks, Facebook will never be a dating network. Facebook isn’t just about your love life, that is just a small portion of it.

[Name] Is No Longer Listed As Single

Another relationship starts, another one ends. That is the cycle. No one is alarmed anymore when someone becomes single it seems, but that is what happens when your community is built around sharing what used to be private information reserved only for those close to you. It’s not uncommon for you to run into someone at the market whom you haven’t seen in 5 years, yet seemingly know everything about them. Still, you wouldn’t dare say or ask about details you’ve read about them on Facebook for fear of being called a stalker, but would rather ask questions about things you already know the answers too.

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Facebook continues to change the way we interact and network with others. As more and more information becomes available to others, the question then becomes, when the time comes for you to update your Facebook Relationship status, what will you choose?

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Joseph Yi is the Director of Marketing at Viralogy.com and works in social media and sports consulting. Find more about him on his website.

Meet Craig Newmark. You may not recognize him if he walked past you, but you’ve probably heard of the website he started. Craigslist. With an estimated 48.7 million people visiting his site a month from the U.S. alone, Craigslist is in a league of its own.

While it continues to climb in traffic, one thing continues to stay consistent: the lack of change. Unlike sites like Apple, where the main page seems to change every other day, Craigslist has had the same bland user interface that everyone has now become accustomed to seeing. Aside from minor changes here and there, Craigslist has made little change to their website for the most part. With no future plans to change the site nor many of its policies, with online engagement and social media on the rise, the question now becomes: What Would Craigslist Do?

No Thanks

“No Thanks.” That is the answer that you would probably get if you asked Craigslist about making a change to the site. Starting at first as an email distribution list for friends in 1995, Craigslist has gone through hundreds and thousands of ’suggestions’ with few changes since then.

Although Craigslist generates revenue solely through paid job ads in select cities, it’s not that they can’t find other means, it’s that they won’t. To many, this is mind boggling, but to Craigslist, its just another day. By no means should anyone worry though, analysts suggest that Craigslist will bring in over $100 million this year from their paid job ads.

Why They Won’t Change

No one can pinpoint the exact reason why Craigslist doesn’t take advantage of the many opportunities they have, but many will agree is that if Craigslist did decide too, they would change the e-commerce landscape.

With just 30 employees, Craigslist gets more traffic than leading e-commerce sites eBay and Amazon.com, each of whom have more than 15,000 employees. Take that into account also the fact that their customer service has been called out for being unresponsive and unhelpful along with it being accused of facilitating prostitution, it is incredible how far they have come.

Door Is Closing

As of right now, Craigslist is in a league of their own. They dominate their market in helping individuals conduct face to face transactions and have yet to have had a serious contender. Still, the question becomes how long will they go without a challenge. When MySpace broke out on the scene, they were seemingly untouchable. Then came Facebook and later, Twitter. Although Craigslist has ruled their market for almost 10 years, everyday they don’t make a move, someone else is.

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Craig Newmark may never be as recognizable as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but perhaps if he changed his name to Craigslist he would be. Nevermind, Craigslist doesn’t change for anyone. Even for Craig himself.

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Joseph Yi is the Director of Marketing at Viralogy.com and works in social media and sports consulting. Find more about him on his website.

The other day I received a Facebook friend request from someone I didn’t know. While I was surprised at the request, it wasn’t the first time. When I view their profile they had over 3,500+ ‘friends,’ zero of which I knew. While there are those that use Facebook to build quality connections and meet new people, there are those that ‘collect’ friends. Like baseball cards, there are some who boast about the number of friends that they have on Facebook.

Still, this is nothing new. Long before there was LinkedIn, there was business cards, and before that, a simple handshake. For as long as ‘networking’ has been linked with ‘opportunity’ and ‘possibility,’ it seems that the common sentiment is that the larger your network is, the more opportunities you will have. With social media though, ones’ ‘network’ is evolving into more than just ‘opportunities’ and ‘possibilities,’ but ‘relationships.’

Size Matters

“Yup, you better believe it.”

If there are two approaches to ones network when it comes to social media, the first concept is that the more people you have in your network, the better. A great example of this is on Twitter. If you browse through some of the users on Twitter, it won’t take you long to find users that are Following 15,000 people. While it would be amazing if they knew all 15,000, the truth is that they probably know at most between 500-1,000 of that group. For the rest of the 14,000 or so, they are just icing on the cake.

Pros: Large ‘network’ that you can share content with

Cons: Lack of relationships with a majority of your network, difficulty in filtering information from your network

It’s Not The Size Of Your Network, It’s How You Use It

The other approach that you will find social media users engaging in is the good old fashioned “quality over quantity” approach. This approach is the complete opposite of the “Size Matters” approach in that it focuses on building quality and meaningful relationships with a smaller, more manageable group. Although the ‘network’ may only reach out to 100-300 users at a time, the power of this network can be just as effective and in some cases even more influential than that of the individual who is ‘friends’ with 15,000.  The reason for this lies in the core network itself. Because the group is smaller, and thus easier to manage, this allows the user to spend more time creating and nurturing relationships with other individuals. In response, the network has stronger ties and in most cases willing to go further when helping each other.

Pros: More time available to build relationships with each, network connections more willing to help, ability to monitor relationships with ease

Cons: Smaller network, your content/news may reach only a couple hundred as opposed to thousands

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So which approach do you practice? Do you collect ‘friends’ like their rookie cards or do you worry less about size, and more about quality? It is too early to say which one is better or worse and until then, the question remains: “Does Size Matter?”

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Photo by Robert Scoble

Did you hear who is getting married? Or about who got accepted into medical school? If you haven’t go check your Facebook feed, it is bound to be there.

As Facebook continues its’ rise to social networking supremacy, it is re-inventing the way we get information. Before there was Facebook, the way we got information about our friends and colleagues was through word of mouth or email. While we still share information through this manner, Facebook makes email seem like ‘snail mail‘ in comparison. Through news feeds and live updates, you can tell people where you are and what you are doing. You can share what you think about the movie you just saw and who you are dating and in some cases, who you aren’t. In an extreme case, you can even update your friends that you are “lost” and “trapped.”

No Pictures Please

Not only is Facebook changing the way people share information, but it is also changing the rules on etiquette and professionalism. When I was in college, a popular line I would hear people say was “this better not end up on Facebook.” Privacy is no longer as simple as saying “no pictures please.” Instead, you have to be worried about your employers seeing that one trip to Vegas, and also what people are saying about you.

Just in the same way we developed email etiquette and best practices when it first was introduced, the same is being done with Facebook.

Your Mother Uses Facebook

Not only are your friends and co-workers on Facebook, but there’s a good chance that so is your mother, father, and that one cousin you rarely see. Some may think it’s ‘un-cool’ that your mother wants to know what you are up too, but then again, she is your friend right?

When Mark Zuckerberg first created Facebook, his plan was to build an online version of real life relationships. Not only does that mean building a platform that represents the relationships you have with your friends and co-workers, but also with your own family. With the median age of Facebook users steadily rising, parents and children will eventually start sending “Friend Requests” which will undoubtedly make for dinner table conversation when they tell you to change your profile photo.

Anytime, Anyplace

If you look at the appeal that sites like Facebook and Twitter have, one of the biggest draws is its real-time updates and that you don’t even have to be sitting in front of a computer to do it. A great example of this was earlier this year when NBA player, and then Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva, tweeted during halftime.

Facebook’s current slogan is “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” In light of the way Facebook has been able to change many aspects,  a better one might be: “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you anytime. anyplace.”

Photo by pshab