The web of the future is going to make content supreme. What’s more, it’s going to make it incredibly valuable in ways that may finally see content creators get real reward and value for their efforts.

Almost since the start of the modern web, industry experts have been continually saying that Content is King: And they’ve been right, but now they’re right in ways that they couldn’t have possibly imagined.

The coming semantic web, known variously as the data web, microformats, FOAF, RDF, Linked Data, Web 3.0 and a whole host of new acronyms is pointing to big changes in cybersphere.

Yahoo recently announced it was embracing semantic web standards , and has already released some interesting tools that point to the future. Many are seeing this as a good thing and direct challenge to Google.

The End of Google?

The father of the modern web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee also recently weighed in saying the semantic web could topple Google’s dominance of the online space. The Australian

While the talk of semantic standards has been around for a while, it is now shaping up as something all web businesses and marketers should start thinking about.

Even though we’ve barely got our heads around Web 2.0, now Web 3.0 will take things to a completely new level . One that most online businesses are totally unprepared for.

Essentially, it is about marking up your data or content in a format that can be universally transferred, processed, shared, combined and mapped by any number of organisations, systems, applications and devices.

In other words making communication much, much easier than it is now.

The possibilities are, well, endless.

Of course, many social networking sites, like Linkedin, Facebook and many others, have already started using semantic data to some extent to deliver their services. Blogs and social networks rely on them at a very basic level too, although many are far from compliant., In any event, the new standards will take it to a whole new level.

Eventually all of the information in these networks will be connected, providing us with applications that will give us a much more seamless experience of not just the web, but in virtually everything where there is data and information stored about us.

Sir Berners-Lee gives one just one example:

“When you look at a calendar, suddenly it’s got information from all the different places. It may have personal photographs from the family, bank statements from your company, financial statements from your company showing up there. You might use those for deciding where you want to meet with somebody at any particular point, figuring out what was happening on any particular day. You may not want to share that with the people you’re in a meeting with. To get a deeper understanding read the transcript of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s interview here.”

For the podcast or full transcript of his interview see Talking with Talis,

New Opportunities New Challenges for Businesses and Marketers

In this environment, those who create the data and content, whether it is in existing databases or on web pages are going to have an inherent advantage. They are going to have the raw material, the commodity that other people will want. New applications, new services will need to get their data from somewhere.

Scott Brinker, http://www.chiefmartec.com/ a marketing technologist with more than 20 years experience and president & CTO of ion interactive, explains the implications for marketers this way.

“Marketing in the semantic web clearly won’t be like marketing in the visual web. Advertising and branding won’t exist in the form we know today.”

On his blog , Scott goes on to point out how the semantic web represents a huge opportunity for marketers and lists some of the challenges and opportunities that they face.

New Headaches

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch says what it means is that we can expect the web to get itself organised in a hurry.

At a base level, it will mean sites, which are correctly marked up, can expect to get a significant amount of more traffic than those that aren’t, so the race is on, but even that’s not the main game anymore.

This all of course means that 1: There’s going to a whole lot more coding going on, making the code writers busier than ever, and 2: It drastically changes the game of search engine optimisation.

And that’s just the start.

For business owners, having to deal with yet another paradigm shift in web development is obviously going to mean greater cost.

Trying to explain it to them is not going to be easy.

But for those businesses that do “get” the new web, there will need to be whole lot of work to do on identifying what data they have, how to categorise it, promote it. Then there are the opportunities to add value to it and even brand the data.

New Semantic Services Already Appearing

Beta service like dapper and Yahoo Pipes are already available for those who have some sort of valid content to take advantage of. Expect a lot more to appear soon.

As marketers what do you think of Web 3.0?

Are we ready for it?

UPDATE

Here are some more links explaining what the semantic web is about.

Web 2.0 is Not the Enemy

Young Guns Driving Semantic Web Part 1

Young Guns Driving Semantic Web Part 2

I’ve just discovered a fantastic new website dedicated to the study and practice of Word of Mouth Marketing.

Called The Society for Word of Mouth (SWOM), it is essentially another social network site, only this time the members are the ones you want to really be with.

Some of the best names in the business are already members and have contributed some great articles already. Be warned, this is a site for committed marketers and business people (new and old) who like to read, write and correspond with each other. A lot of serious discussion is already going on about strategies, tactics and results.

If you’re like me this sort of information is irresistible.

If you really want to learn what marketing is all about and how to do it properly, then this is the site to join.

If you want quick fixes, then you should probably go elsewhere.

Click the image below to get there and join. It’s free.

Let me know what you think.

When I first began working in e-commerce I was regularly "quoted" seriously high six figure amounts just to build a website, with another similar amount required for implementation.(It wasn’t that long ago.)

Mercifully, things are so much better now. Today there are so many free solutions and services that it is possible for anyone to build a fully featured website for nothing. And in almost no time.

Obviously there will still be design and set up costs involved, but for the most part the change has been radical.

Here then is my list of 10 free services and applications to get you on your way. They are not in any order, so you can choose at random.

1: Wordpress - Originally developed as a blogging platform, this free download contains almost everything a new user could want. It comes with a range of free plugins that extend it’s functionality to email newsletters, forums, surveys, a shopping cart, search engine optimisation, social networking and the list goes on. There are over 1,000 plugins on the official Wordpress site, and they are growing all the time. There are also many, many free design "themes" to choose from, so you don’t even need to hire a designer.

Setting it up only takes about five minutes for anyone familiar with web servers, and maybe an hour or two for those who aren’t. Wordpress provides full instructions on its website.

If that is still too hard, it even offers a hosted solution, to make the process even easier.

There are also many other similar solutions such as Google’s Blogger , Live Journal , My Opera , Movable Type and Type Pad .

2: Prestshop - this shopping cart is French, Fantastique and Free. It offers just about everything you could want from a shopping cart. Again, it is relatively easy to set up, and even if you do find it intimidating, anyone with a modest level of technical know how should be able to install this in an afternoon.

3: Content Management Systems - The leaders in this field are Drupal , Joomla , Modxcms and CakePHP . Content Management Systems require a bit more technical knowledge to set up, but the fact that they are all free, means you shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts to get a serious CMS system going. If you’re the DIY type, then one of these will more than adequately suit you.

4: Google Analytics - There is no longer any excuse for not monitoring what your customers are doing on your website. Google Analytics provides a free traffic reporting and analysis solution that everyone can understand. (I used to pay four figures a month for the type of information Google Analytics now supplies for free.)

Other free services you can try are Monitor US and WebCEO , although they do charge a small amount for extra services.

5: Dada Mail - a free email campaign and list manager, what more can I say. You may need help setting it up on your server, but otherwise it’s a bargain.

6: Feed Burner - If you’re planning to write a blog then Feed Burner is one solution to help you feed your blog posts to the world.

7: Feed Blitz - like Feed Burner, except it sends your posts out as email.

8: Survey Monkey - a fully customisable survey solution. Free for 10 questions and 100 responses per month, and just $20 per month for more than that.
Allows all sorts of questions and response types, provides full reporting, validation and respondent management.

Do I have to tell you yet again that I used to pay four figures a time for surveys like this?

9: Firefox and Webdeveloper Toolbar - the Webdeveloper Toolbar plugin for Firefox allows you to analyse 100’s of different parameters about your website and your competitors website at the touch of a button. If you’re serious about your website performance, then this tool is a must.

10: The Gimp - an open source alternative to Photoshop.

For Those of You Who Can Count

There’s actually 21 free services listed above, which just proves my point about not needing to pay large amounts of money for web development. In truth, I could have listed over a hundred free solutions, and I may yet do that in another post.

The Advantage of Using Professionals

Professional design and set up can make or break any online business, so while the above solutions are free, I highly recommend using a professional services if you can. Their knowledge and experience can save you a lot of aggravation and headaches.

Also, while many of the technical solutions are now free or relatively economical, proper business planning and marketing are still essential. If you are serious about creating an online business, then you must budget adequately for these items.

Or, if you are really parsimonious then you can just keep reading my blog where I reveal the necessities of successfully doing business online.

It was a surprise in so many ways, all of which illustrate how easy it is to generate fantastic word of mouth marketing.

It started when I left a tiny post on Future Now’s blog where Holly works.

Next thing I know I get an email from them saying they are going to send me a free copy.

Very impressed, but wait, I thought, they probably don’t know I live outside of the US, in Perth, Western Australia the most isolated capitol city in the western world.

Seriously, pick a direction, any direction, and the next nearest city is 3,000 kms away, and in most cases closer to 8-9,000kms.

Anyway, I thanked them profusely and sent back the mail details, expecting to hear back saying that they hadn’t realised I was so far away and that they didn’t deliver outside of the US.

Downunder we get that at least half the time when ordering online, so we always expect it.

Monday Morning Surprise

Didn’t hear anymore, but this morning a FedEx van came down the drive with my freshly minted copy of "The Soccer Mom Myth" . Now this thing is only being released in New York today Monday, March 10, and I already have a copy in Perth.

I am seriously impressed.

Firstly they gave it to me for free, when I wasn’t expecting it.

Secondly they sent it half way around the world, at their cost, also totally unexpected.

Thirdly it arrived in about three days. Three days! Unbelievable. Normally we bank on two weeks.

I know it’s a marketing strategy, about going the extra yard and creating what Tom Peters calls raving fanatics for your product or brand, but it makes no difference that I know.

When it happens, you still feel incredibly privileged and special. I just love it that they looked after me so well when they didn’t have to.

Think about it, when was the last time a business looked after you really, really well?

So What Happens Now?

Firstly I blog and post about the extraordinary level of customer service of Future Now and "The Soccer Mom Myth" anywhere and everywhere I can. (And I haven’t even read the book yet. Talk about creating marketing buzz.)

Then I email all my female colleagues telling them about the book, although in truth I’m a bit reticent to do this ‘cos once they discover that I have one of the few copies of the book in this region of the southern hemisphere, they will pressure me relentlessly to lend it to them, and once that happens I’ll never see it again.

But if I don’t, they’ll wait till I go out, then come ’round, go thru my stuff and borrow it anyway. Best to share the love upfront.

Next, once those of those of my female friends who work in marketing have read it, they’ll probably demand that all their male colleagues read it before they’ll ever discuss marketing with them again. (It may even become required reading for a few hubbies, especially prior to birthdays, Xmas and anniversaries.)

And of course, once I’ve finished reading it I’ll almost certainly spread the word on how great it is a whole lot more.

This is Classic Marketing.

A stellar example of how to generate word of mouth buzz. I suspect this book will top The New York Times’ Best Seller List real soon.

Stay tuned for an actual book review in the coming week.

Also, if any of you have any classic stories where a business went out of its way to service you, I’d love to hear them.

Update: Be sure to check out Michelle’s site WonderBranding - Marketing to Women (there’s a lot for us men to learn) and a interesting post on the new Word of Mouth society .

Direct marketers are usually the sharpest cookies in the marketing arena because they are obsessed with producing financial results, and will usually do whatever it takes to turn a dollar. (No bad taste jokes please.)

Therefore, they are usually worth listening to as they can always back up their marketing strategies with hard results.

The Number One Tactic

According to Target Marketing’s Media Usage Report, the number one tactic for getting more customers and giving the strongest return on investment (ROI) was direct mail.

That’s the printed, personal letter in an envelope with stamp kind of mail.

Second, and by some margin, was email, although email was still regarded as being three times more effective at producing tangible results than search engine marketing.

Interestingly search engine marketing was rated only slightly better than telemarketing (the dreaded cold calling) in terms of its effectiveness and return on investment.

Surprisingly search engine optimisation was rated even lower than these two in terms of effectiveness.

(Which leads me to suspect that most of them are either paying too much for their SEO, or it isn’t being done properly. Unfortunately, this is a common enough situation.)

Direct Response vs Branding

Commenting on the results David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, said that Internet advertising remains oriented more toward direct response objectives than branding goals.

If that’s true, then it remains in direct contradiction to what many digital agencies and ad networks are trying to sell.

I, along with many other marketers, are continually pointing out that the research and reports on online advertising over the past 10 years has consistently shown that it doesn’t work as a direct response tactic. The figures have stayed consistently around the 1 click thru for every 1000 people exposed to the ad. At the average cost per click it, this usually results in it costing more to get a customer than most businesses make on the sale.

Online agencies are desperately trying to reposition online advertising as a branding and product awareness tactic in an attempt to overcome such continually poor results.

But as eMarketer and even McKinsey report, most online marketers are using, and want to continue to use the web as a direct response medium.

Obviously, there is going to be lot of conflict and conflagration before this one gets resolved.

Online Ads and Rich Media Tank

In another report, this time from Marketing Sherpa, it said that all of the marketers it surveyed regarded online advertising as the worst online marketing tactic with over 90% of them saying it had the worst return on investment.

And this included rich media ads, which really puts a downer on agencies pushing Web 2.0, Flash, animated ads and anything involving rich content.

Interestingly this report also said that online marketers regarded search engine optimisation as having the greatest return on investment, ahead of email which came in at second place. This is in direct contradiction to the other report.

I would assert that part of the discrepancies is because online marketing is still a new industry. How we measure effectiveness and return on investment varies greatly, and some marketers are simply much better at getting value for money out of their efforts than others.

Even how these surveys are conducted, how the questions asked and just who is surveyed are going to skew the results.

What To Do?

For the business owner, this yet again reveals how careful you have to be when choosing online marketers and online marketing tactics. Here’s a few tips:

Demand accountability for the results

Ask for a money back guarantee, or pay for performance contract

At the very least demand to see a track record of producing results. A record that can be measured in dollar terms.

However, effectively measuring performance is another post,and more than likely a whole series of posts.

However, it is often totally overlooked by many in the ecommece and online marketing arena. Scratch any online marketer and you’ll find an almost obsessive focus on search engine optimization, search engine marketing and online advertising.

There will probably be some talk about email marketing, and, if they are really on the ball, a discussion about conversion rate improvement, but traditional offline marketing methods will probably barely rate a mention.

As a business owner, this means you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to drive customers to your site and generate revenue.

Traditional marketing’s effectiveness at generating online customers was recently highlighted in research by The e-Tailing Group.

It found that consumers are most motivated to go online after:

viewing magazine ads - 47.2%

newspapers - 42.3%

TV - 42.8%

reading articles - 43.7%

Women were more likely than men to be motivated by coupons - 41.8% vs. 29%

and in-store promotions - 29% vs. 24.5%

while men were more driven to start an online search based on a face-to-face conversation 36.1% vs. 29.5%

Results Matter

Such results are impressive in their own right, but they become even more impressive when compared with the almost non-existent traffic generating capacity of online advertising, currently at 0.1% according to leading online researchers such as Doubleclick and others. (See Online Advertising Still Doesn’t Work.)

With online advertising and search engine marketing taking the lion’s share of online marketing budgets, it may be time for you as a business owner to re-evaluate the marketing budget spend.

Clearly there are more more effective ways of getting the maximum value from your marketing dollar.

The problem then becomes where do you turn to for cohesive marketing advice. Many online marketers and marketing companies are young, and totally inexperienced in the arena of traditional marketing. Plus, it’s probably not something they even want to get into.

While traditional marketing and advertising agencies obviously have the experience and technique in mainstream marketing, they may only have minimal understanding of what’s required online. (Plus, as I’ve said elsewhere, with conversion rates universally low, there are not many people who can truly claim they are masters of online marketing anyway.)

Demand Greater Accountability

As a business owner about the only thing you can do is demand greater accountability from all of your marketing people. Create a culture of producing tangible results, and not accepting anything less. That probably will upset some of your service suppliers, but you will get a much clearer picture of what’s working and what’s not. Based on that, you can then make better informed marketing decisions.

The Double Edged Sword

One final thing. This discussion cuts both ways. Much of your online activity will drive customers to purchase from you offline. Many customers will fully research what they want o buy online and then go and purchase it offline. They walk into your store knowing more about your product than your sales staff. The only thing the sales staff need to do is get out of the customer’s way and not argue with them.

But that’s another post. Stay tuned.

I’ve been involved in a great conversation with John Quarto-vonTivadar over at Future Now about the best place to put calls to action.

It started after John and his friends saw online retailer, Crutchfield, had put all of its shopping cart call to action buttons on the far left of the screen.

This started a whole debate on where the preference for right sided calls to action came from, how to test them against left sided ones, and the total influence of design elements on the buying process.

Some very smart people have contributed to this conversation, so it’s worth checking out.
Testing Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You

We haven’t come up with any definitive answers yet, but the discussion is lively and has brought a whole range of interesting points.

Some of these sites such as Land’s End, LL Bean, QVC have consistently been among the leaders for a long time. What’s interesting is that they were all leaders in the field of direct catalogue marketing long before they went online.

Obviously they know something about how to sell, and how to transfer that expertise to the online world. Yes Virginia, the old rules still apply.

What’s more these results are now starting to get close to the bricks and mortar average of 50%, so it shows that great sales results can be achieved online

How Does The Popcorn Factory Do It?

Well, as I’ve been telling clients for years, a lot of this stuff isn’t rocket science. The Popcorn Factory has covered off on all the basics. The things that many marketers regard as common sense, and yet seem to go over the heads of others.

First of all they have a good design. A bit too Americana and apple pie for me, but given their demographic it’s a perfect fit.

Next, great pictures. Lots of them. Yes, that does mean you will have to engage a professional photographer to do all your product shots. Don’t skimp and do it yourself just ‘cos you’ve all got digital cameras. You get what you pay for and reap the results.

Third: Great Copy. When you have lovable, luscious and chocolate all in the same breath, how can you fail? As above, pay for a professional copywriter to write “all” your copy. (Although I’m not sure how pigs and going Hog Wild relates to Valentine’s Day. Maybe it’s another American thing. I’m still trying to figure out Groundhog Day. Maybe one of our cousins from across the pond can enlighten us on this cultural oddity.)

Next, Good Navigation, based around special occasions, seasonal events and other elements of Americana such as NASCAR and Baseball. In other words, it’s not based around internal business units, corporate hierarchy or product manufacturing lines. It’s based around what matters to the customer.

It’s fast loading because it uses Akamai, a Content Distribution Network. The faster a site is, the more sales you’ll make.

The Checkout process is simple, although probably too many steps for my liking, but at least it guides the customer through every step of the process.

There’s obviously a lot more fine detail involved, but this is just a brief analysis. getting the basics right is still the best place to start.

What Can We Do?

Get the basics right.

Examine all of the above sites and look art what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. I’m sure you’ll see similarities between most of them.

Copy what they’ve done where you can. See if you can figure out what they were thinking when they did the various things on their sites.

Budget for the things that matter.

I know services like Akamai, professional photographers and copywriters will probably blow many of your budgets, but hopefully these examples help to illustrate where you should focus your online marketing efforts.

“Big deal,” I thought. Traditional graphic ads, banner ads etc have a click thru rate barely above zero, so 5 times zero is still nothing.

My assessment was confirmed later in the report where it stated: “…the click-rate for plain GIF or JPG image ads based on DoubleClick data is approximately 0.1%”

So let’s be clear about this. For every 1,000 people who see the ad, only 1 will actually click on it. If you couple that with the appallingly low conversion rates of 2% for most sites, then you need 50,000 people to see the ad just to make one sale.

You Will Lose Money

With the average cost of an order per campaign running at around $100, it is a very expensive way to get a sale. In fact, depending on what you’re selling and what your average order value is, it is highly likely the campaign is losing you money, a lot of money.

And that doesn’t include the creative cost of making the ad if you’re using an ad agency.

(The fact that video ads are only marginally more effective - 0.47% - only adds further weight as to how ineffective the whole online advertising strategy is.)

What ’s more, these figures haven’t improved in over 10 years.

That is, despite online advertising growing into a booming multi billion-dollar industry and attracting (supposedly) some of the best, most talented people, the industry is worse than ever at producing tangible, bankable results.

Accept the Evidence

And it’s not as if the evidence hasn’t been freely available to people who care to look. Every year there are numerous reports highlighting the dismal click thru rates of online advertising.

To hide the awful truth of such poor performance, the industry has resorted to the usual trick of inventing new terms such as “engagement” and, “awareness” etc. Don’t be fooled.

As leading web research expert and Google evangelist, Avinash Kaushik says: “Engagement is not a metric, it’s an excuse”

An excuse for not being willing to measure what really matters in business. And what really matters in any business is the bottom line - making a sale, making a profit, increasing the profit, reducing costs, generating a lead etc. Anything else is a path to bankruptcy.

What You Must Know

One of the great things about the web is that you can measure everything and see how effective anything is. Usually you will see results within 24 hours to 48 hours of implementing a direct marketing tactic. So, if your online advertising and marketing isn’t producing clear results within that time frame, then it simply isn’t working.

There are other much more effective and much cheaper options available.

Further Reading

Video Ad Benchmarks: Average Campaign Performance Metrics, DoubleClick.

Growth of Online Advertising; Ineffective Results? Kevin Gold, Search Marketing Standard

So Many Ads, So Few Clicks, Business Week