A recent eMarketer article suggests no, companies “don’t need to respond to every ounce of negative buzz.” The article suggests letting other customers (or brand advocates) address some of the problems. That strategy can backfire, though, if a number of customer questions go unanswered. For example, 49.5 percent of respondents in a Conversocial survey said they’d be far less likely to buy anything from a company that had unanswered complaints or inquiries on their social sites.

If customer questions are bogging down your brand page on social sites and your social media team, consider establishing a separate page for customer service-related issues. For example, Comcast’s @comcastcares and Delta Airline’s @DeltaAssist pages on Twitter are good examples of companies successfully setting up a separate presence to handle customer issues.

If the thought of managing multiple pages makes your head spin and you’re not going to address customer concerns on your brand page, consider directing customers to where they can get help. For example, Virgin Airlines offers a clear statement in its Twitter bio: “Although we won’t address specific guest service issues on Twitter, our team of experts is eager to help you at http://vgn.am/GstHlp or call 1-877-359-8474.” This is also a good tactic if you’re in an industry that deals with sensitive personal and/or financial information, such as banks.

If your company is constrained either by budget or resources—or both—and you know you won’t be able to respond to every customer question that comes in over the virtual transom, I recommend establishing criteria to help prioritize the questions you should respond to. Consider whether the problem or question is related to any of following:

• Brand reputation
• Product quality
• Safety
• A potential legal issue

When you do respond to customer complaints, keep in mind that it matters not only what you say, but also how you say it.

Are you using social sites to field customer service issues? How do you determine which questions or complaints to respond to?

A common misstep I see is the tendency to rush toward social media without a clear idea of why. Facebook pages, proprietary communities, and Twitter accounts pop up all over without a clear strategy behind them. This doesn’t bother me as much as another habit I’ve noticed—because, after all, social media is relatively new (in the grand scheme of things) and companies will figure out their strategies soon enough, especially after diving in.

The other habit, though, is a bigger concern. Some companies rush toward social media with the assumption that that’s all there is—that social media should replace other communications channels and, for instance, that Web content is so “yesterday.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Rather than trade social media for other channels, I believe companies need to integrate social media elements with existing channels in ways that benefit both. Integrate community discussions into your Web content (and link from one to the other); bring your case study company representatives in as guest bloggers; include a real-time hash-tagged Twitter stream on your events landing page.

This blog post from SandersSays captures my point perfectly:

“When I asked him what his social media strategy was, his answer surprised me:

“You don’t need a social media strategy—you need a brand strategy that leverages social media. Don’t get off the brand strategy just because there’s a new communications channel; that’s how you lose the plot as a brand. Technology is the tail, not the dog.”

Wow. He’s spot on. I saw this back in ‘97 when companies had to quickly create an “Internet strategy,” often wasting tons of money on agencies, consultants, and painful meetings. What they eventually realized was that they needed to integrate this new communications channel in their brand promise/fulfillment approach to their customers. Those that did succeeded wildly in the coming years.”

How are you integrating your Facebook pages with your Web content? Or landing pages with Twitter streams?

As it turns out, I’m like a lot of shoppers—50 percent, to be exact—who rely on online research for their purchasing decisions. According to a recent eMarketer report, customer reviews are the most important capability for a retailer to have on its site and a lack of reviews will cause almost as many visitors to leave a site.

Facebook pages are another way to solicit customer feedback but aren’t as influential as customer reviews in making purchasing decisions. Regardless, 91 percent of companies surveyed plan to develop a presence on the social networking site instead of implementing user reviews.

In terms of impacting customer behavior, Twitter falls behind Facebook and is considered to have little effect on buying decisions. However, Twitter follows closely on the heels of customer reviews among sharing capabilities planned for implementation in 2010.

Whether your company is in the B2C or B2B space, providing customers with the ability to review your products and services is a good marketing strategy with potentially powerful results. Have you implemented user-generated reviews on your site or do you plan to? Are you using social tools to help drive sales? We’d like to hear what’s working for you.

This week I sat in on a webinar that outlined the latest eye-tracking data for the Web. I was interested in these five findings:

1. The F Pattern. Studies show that we read horizontally first, then track down the page, forming an “F” pattern. Also, time records of online viewing show that most people *scan* web pages—they don’t read them.
2. The Golden Triangle. When looking at search results, readers spend a lot of time in the top left corner of the screen. A Yahoo study found that putting thumbnail photos or videos next to search results improved click-through rates, and Google found that thumbnail images in search results help users more quickly decide whether the result will be useful. A picture really does say a thousand words…
3. Banner Blindness. Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy founded by Jakob Nielsen, the guru of Web page usability) found through heat maps that users ignore Web ads. Plain text on a Web page gets read in the golden triangle and face photos draw eyeballs, but ads are completely ignored.
4. Talking Heads Bore. Studies show that online video of a talking person loses the user’s attention—users start looking at things in the background of the person in the video, or anywhere else except the person talking. The lesson? If you’re going to shoot video of a person talking, keep it really short (less than one minute) or use a photo instead. Sometimes video isn’t the right medium for your content. The most successful use of video on the Web, according to eye-tracking studies, is when you need to explain a concept or demonstrate some type of process or product.
5. Email Introductions Ignored. In e-newsletters, the studies found that most users ignore the introductory text. Sixty percent of users look at just the first two words and then skip down the page.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out these sites:

• http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines_book.pdf
• http://useit.com/eyetracking
• http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/methodology

This isn’t the first time Radiohead has broken with music industry norms. The band split from its label, EMI, two years ago and released its last album, In Rainbows, directly to fans via the Internet.  Not only that, the band instituted a novel pricing model: Fans could pay what they wanted.  (I meant to pay $10 US, but I botched the Euro conversion and accidentally paid $20.)

The In Rainbows experiment was an obvious response to the digital distribution and Internet file-sharing revolution that’s racked the music industry. Radiohead apparently thought fans would illegally download the album if it chose the traditional marketing approach. But perhaps Radiohead also saw an opportunity to work with their fans rather than against them? The experiment seemed to have worked. Radiohead’s publisher, Warner Chappel, says In Rainbows made more money than the band’s two previous albums.

Radiohead’s reported decision to produce only singles appears to have been made in the same vein. As the New York Times story points out, “According to Nielsen SoundScan, U.S. sales of albums, in physical and digital form, fell 14 percent last year, continuing a multiyear decline. While consumers bought more than a billion individual tracks in the United States, which accounts for a majority of online sales worldwide, they bought only 65 million digital albums in 2008.” If these numbers truly reflect the purchasing patterns of music fans, they, too, have abandoned the full-length album format. (I, for one, haven’t).

If music fans really do prefer singles over albums, Radiohead might be making a smart decision. Why not work with their fans rather than against them?

Radiohead’s strategy is a good lesson for serving your audience, too: Give them what they want, how they want it. For Web content, make it easy to access by minimizing the pages and links customers have to click through. If it’s down-loadable content, make registrations and sharing of contact info optional. Your customers will sign up for a newsletter or follow-up contact if they want it! As for the content itself, frame it around your audience’s needs, not your company’s. Do customers want a detailed explanation of a product’s new features, or would they rather know how it can help their business? If you think it’s the latter, focus on benefits rather than details that you’re internal teams are proud of.

The Internet and the rise of social media provide your customers access to an unprecedented variety of information sources. That means you’re content has a lot of competition. If you want customers to read, watch, or listen to what you produce, it better be in line with what they want.

When you’re optimizing your conversion rate, try giving each page — or better yet, each piece of content (video, podcast, blog) — a numeric monetary value.

For example, in our Breville case study, we showcased how content can increase conversion rates. Let’s say, the price of an espresso machine is $100. If Page A sells 5 espresso machines and Video B sells 20 espresso machines, then Page A is worth $500 and Video B is worth $2000.

This helps you to visualize what is working and will suggest ways to replicate and build on your successes.

“Working your content until it works” is a great call to make sure we’re combining SEO, content & keyword and metrics strategies, because they all work together to boost the effectiveness (and dollar value) of your content.

• There are 14 billion internet searches done each month (Comscore, March 09)
• CNN moved their search ranking from #4 to #1 and got 50 million more visits a month on their website
• Spending on on-line marketing is forecasted to increase 11% in 2009; search is expected to increase 14%; 60% of respondents expect to cut traditional marketing (Forrester, April 2009)
• 68% of the population of people who use search only access the first page of Google search results (Jupiter, 2008); of the webinar attendees, 30% visit the first page only and 48% visit the first two pages (but attendees are presumably more advanced search users).
• In 1998, Google indexed 26 million pages; in 2008 that number rose to 1 trillion, which means your competition for search ranking has increased 400 million percent in the last 10 years.
• If your search term delivers 5 to 10 million results, that’s considered a “competitive” term or keyword. “Disaster recovery”, for instance, delivers 19,700,000 results.

Some SEO basics:

1. Make sure your keywords are used in the content of your page. For B2B sites, the webinar speaker recommended that 100 to 500 pages of content are needed to match competitors’ search rankings.
2. Make sure your meta page descriptions are unique for each page
3. Insert your keyword(s) in the URL
4. Target inbound links to increase rankings

The new Google revisions and how they affect your content strategy:

• Go to www.google.com and search on something (try disaster recovery); on the search results page, right under the Google logo, click on Show options.
• Notice the time parameters? Those are new-which lets you sort results by when they published. And that means that fresh, keyword-rich content will become increasingly valuable for your SEO ranking.
• Also, search queries have evolved over time, such that people have increased the number of words they enter into search engines. That means the “long tail” of search becomes more relevant and that a larger number of keywords might optimize your search rankings. Those who are searching on the long tail terms are much more qualified leads than those searching on one- or two-word common terms. The depth of their search means they’re more educated and/or interested in the topic, and more likely to want to find your site and/or buy what you’re selling.
• Now, back to Google. See the Wonder wheel at the bottom of the options navigation? Click on that. It delivers a graphical taxonomy of search terms around your original term. Cool, huh? This might be helpful for your keyword strategy-e.g., use keywords that surround your original term.

The webinar was only an hour, so it just touched the surface of Google’s new functionality. But I learned enough to know that as search technologies evolve, not only should your SEO strategy evolve but also your content strategy. Make sense?

There. I said it. Sound counterintuitive? It’s not. Let me explain.

Too many marketers feel the need to list each and every feature of their product or service, thinking this approach will get their customers’ attention. That mentality plays out something like this: “Hey, look at this nifty product/service we’ve developed. Isn’t it great? And aren’t we great? Don’t you want to buy our stuff because we’re so great?”

Don’t get me wrong. Features can differentiate your offerings from your competitors’ and help your customers evaluate a potential purchase. But list features after you’ve captured your customers’ attention. Even customers who already know that they need a particular product or service are more likely to respond to your communication if you first show them what’s in it for them.

Benefits vs. Features

Focusing your message on product or service benefits comes down to focusing on your customer. But even with the best intentions, it’s easy to get lost in describing all the cool stuff your product or service does. Knowing the difference between the two is an important first step in identifying the benefits that will win your customers’ attention.

Features are product or service attributes. They explain how a product performs or what a service provides. They also differentiate a product or service from competitors.

Features may create certain advantages for the customer, which lead to benefits. But features are not benefits in and of themselves.

Benefits are the results created by a product or service. They solve problems, address needs, and ultimately provide a reason to buy something.

Notice the difference between the features and the benefits in the following mock copy, and how the advantages lead to the benefits:

Rocco’s Rocket Ships

State the Benefits

Your audience should be able to pick out their benefits from your list of features, right? Maybe, but assuming your audience is jumping the gap between your product or service features and the benefits they’ll gain from them is a big gamble in this day of media overload. You need to spell it out. What exactly are you doing for them or their business? What problem are you solving? What makes your product relevant to them? To put it bluntly, who cares if you’re a market leader unless you’re doing something that makes a difference for your customers?

Focusing on benefits to the customer is one way to relate your product or service to the customer’s point of view. It’s turning your focus from the navel-gazing “gee, look at the cool thing we made” to “hey, look at what we can do for you.”

Strategies for Identifying Benefits

Often marketers are too close to their product or service to see past the features. To them, the benefits may be inherent. Here are some strategies for shaking off the marketing lens and approaching your product or service from the customer’s point of view.

1. Paint a picture. Visualize in detail who your customer is and what problem they’re facing. Are they standing in front of an overflowing server closet? Are they sitting in their office daydreaming about a luxury vacation? Once you have a clear picture, put yourself in your customer’s situation. What would help solve your problem?

2. Ask, “So what?” You can find the benefits of most features by simply asking, “So what?” Continue to ask why until you get to the ultimate, underlying need behind creating a product or service in the first place. It might go something like this:

• Crown Bright Strips give you whiter teeth.
• So what?
• Your smile will be brighter.
• So what?
• You’ll look better and feel more confident.
• So what?
• With a brighter, more confident smile, it will be easier to get what you want out of life, like that great job.

3. Be specific. Specifying general benefits like “affordable” or “convenient” isn’t enough. Your customers want context—to know how something is more convenient or how much money they could save. This strategy comes down to knowing your audience. If you know exactly who you’re talking to and what their unique concerns are, you’ll be better equipped to identify the specific benefits that they may respond to.

Use these strategies to transition from marketing to your customers to engaging them instead. Stating the benefits you can provide, or what’s in it for them, shows your customers that you understand their concerns, the problems they face, and their point of view.