How do you deliver a marketing message to a Web-audience that hates advertising? A few years back I proposed a solution based on short-form television-style programs: the “120 Second Solution,” two minute brand-story commercials formatted in a mini three act Web-video presentation. Today this concept is called Branded Entertainment: a two to seven minute commercial that combines content, advertising, and entertainment in a brand story format designed to attract and hold an audience’s attention while delivering a memorable core marketing message.

The concept has been a hard sell as it flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom about advertising formats, attention spans, and content credibility. Like most good ideas it seems that branded entertainment’s time has finally come. Various marketing blogs are all a twitter about Orbit Gum’s new campaign called “Dirty Shorts” featuring its first branded entertainment effort, a 5:17 minute branded video from Jason Bateman and Will Arnett. It seems these well-known actors have enough faith in this advertising format that they’ve formed DumbDumb, a branded video production company. Their first effort, “The Prom Date” was viewed 110,000 times in just three days.

Commitment To A Core Message

Of course not everybody has the deep pockets required to hire Jason Bateman, but with proper planning and implementation a branded entertainment video campaign is within reach of most successful small and medium sized companies.

The single biggest obstacle in implementing this kind of campaign is not the cost, but rather, the commitment to a style and format most business owners find hard to swallow: the need to focus on a single core reason why customers should purchase your product or service and to deliver that message in some bold or offbeat manner.

All too often entrepreneurs think of advertising in conventional terms like display, banner, and classified (e.g. Adwords). Even Web video has been pushed, prodded and crammed into pre-roll and post-roll television style spots. The Web isn’t television; it requires a whole new way of thinking when it comes to marketing presentations.

The Web is by nature an unconventional arena that demands bold content. You can say and do a lot of things on the Web, but the one thing that won’t be tolerated is boring your audience. Add to that the fact that we live in a product placement world where the line between advertising and content has been permanently erased and you have an advertising environment that demands something different.

You must stop thinking of your website as a digital brochure and start thinking of it as a total immersive multimedia advertising environment that connects to a target audience using standout, break-through communication techniques. The goal is quality engagements not shotgun traffic.

The Goal Is Quality Engagement NOT Traffic

For the average Web business it is important to remember that huge viral numbers don’t come from clever campaigns alone, but rather, are the result of great campaigns plus advertising support, extensive PR, and paid-blog placement. That is not to say that small and medium-sized companies shouldn’t pursue this approach but rather, the goal of these campaigns should be quality engagement not quantity traffic – a far more affordable and productive objective.

How To Deliver Break-Through Advertising

There are various ways to achieve what ad agencies call break-through advertising, but in every case those methods call for content that stands out from the crowd, be it humorous, offbeat, alarming or just plain entertaining, if it doesn’t standout it won’t make a connection, and your website presentation will be instantly forgotten.

The best and most complete example of branded entertainment that I have seen was the brilliant Shredded Wheat “The Palace of Light” campaign. It was very funny while delivering a powerful marketing message. Unfortunately the campaign is no longer running, but if you can find some of the videos on the Web, they are definitely worth seeing. They are great examples of how to turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience.

In a speech about break-through advertising, Chuck Porter, co-founder of Crispin Porter + Bogusky states the average person sees conservatively 1600 to 3000 marketing messages a day. That’s a lot of advertising. If your marketing communication doesn’t standout in some way, you are probably wasting your advertising budget.

Two Kinds of Advertising

In response to a question asking whether advertising was technology and data driven, or creatively driven, Porter explained that there are basically two types of advertising.

The tech-data driven ad is all about finding that person who needs what you sell at a time when he or she wants to purchase it and then delivering the message to them. This is the reason why so much of what you see, hear, and read in marketing journals and blogs is filled with statistics and analysis of who is doing what and where. All of which is perfectly fine if the only customer you want is the one that needs what you sell instantly or who is motivated by impulse.

This kind of advertising is all about immediacy; the customer needs or impulsively wants what you provide right now. The key is immediate access. If customers don’t have instant accéss, chances are the impulse to purchase will fade, or the prospect will find it more convenient to get the product elsewhere. In this type of advertising, timing and immediacy is paramount. The downside is no long-term relationship is established.

Digital products that can be downloaded instantly seem to be most appropriate for this approach, however that must be qualified by the level of cost and sophistication associated with the product or service: the higher the cost and the more complex or advanced the offering, the less impulsive the decision, and the more a client must be wooed. Advertising theory commonly suggests it takes seven engagements in order to win over a client.

The other kind of advertising is creative-based; it’s advertising built around brand awareness and identity. This is the kind of advertising that creates customers, and establishes long-term loyalty. This is the kind of advertising that can benefit from implementing a branded entertainment campaign.

Why Branded Entertainment Works

If branded entertainment is done right, it engages an audience, it informs and enlightens, it entertains and amuses, it’s meaningful and memorable and potentially viral. Branded entertainment is more than advertising, it’s marketing, and it is designed to influence attitudes, change perceptions, and prompt action.

it’s time to start taking your Bing optimization seriously if you haven’t been already. For one, Bing will soon power Yahoo search. For two, Bing deliver’s Facebook’s web search results, while Facebook is giving people more reasons to search with them.

Bing is making changes of its own. It’s been a very big week for the search engine (or “decision engine”) if you will. It’s up to you to decide if any of these changes will have a direct effect on you, but some of them may attract more users in general, and if nothing else, that gives you even more of a reason to give Bing a fair amount of your focus.

Bing has made some design changes and added a bunch of new features. For starters, the quick tabs have moved from the left pane to the just below the search box.
“Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing,” says Bing Corporate VP Brian MacDonald. “We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive.”

Bing has launched some new entertainment features for music, games, TV, and movies. In addition to an entertainment hub at bing.com/entertainment, users can now find richer search results in these categories.
“76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go,” says Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions — from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love.”

Bing is now putting lyrics to songs on the search results page, as well as full length streaming of over 5 million songs (in partnership with Microsoft’s Zune branch). Users can stream any of these songs once at their full length. After that, the song will allow for a 30-second preview. Of course users are given the option to buy songs from Zune, iTunes, or Amazon.

Bing is now providing info on over 35,000 games, including reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs. In addition to that, Bing is offering about 100 games that can be played right from Bing.
“Just Search, Click. Play . So you can now search for your favorite casual game, and with one click, be playing the game,” says Mehdi. “This is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy. Second, hosting the games inline means you can be sure they are actually games and not malware. Finally, the Microsoft Games team included some fun social features that allow you to actually invite friends from your social network to play with you right from the game.”

Bing is now offering thousands of episodes from over 1,500 shows (including some HD). They also provide guide information.

Bing has also enhanced its search experience around categories like autos, finance, and movies, and health is reportedly getting an overhaul as well.

Bing has posted a closer look at some more new features including Bing News, Bing Finance, Combined Flight Answers, Auto Suggest, and Visual Search here, and here’s even more specifically on Finance. Here’s a closer look at new Shopping features.

Bing is also available as a default search option on the new iPhone, and Microsoft has been heavily encouraging users to switch to it. That could be another factor in increased Bing usage. Here are some more reasons the future looks bright for Bing.

It’s been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they’re updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn’t the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?

Matt’s response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says…

“Whenever you’re thinking about search engines, it’s much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don’t post every day. Sometimes I don’t post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it…”

Matt implies that you’ll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn’t that much different than stuff that’s already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Quality is always priority one, but I don’t think that’s to say that freshness doesn’t count. For example, as we looked at recently,

Google’s time filters (which are more readily available to searchers, courtesy of the recent redesign of the SERPs), not to mention the realtime results Google often displays, can add some benefit to providing fresh content. Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land looking at how the time filter may even help smaller brands get some visibility.

Of course Google has gone out of its way with Caffeine to increase the speed at which it indexes content so it can provide the freshest results possible.

Author: Chris Crum

Many site owners make the mistake of building a website without laying out a clear plan for their online business. This is a sure set-up for failure. There are 1000s of abandoned sites on the web due to lack of careful planning. Before designing your website you should ask yourself some questions to avoid making mistakes down the road.

10 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About Designing a Website

1. What Are Your Business Goals?

It’s easy to say, “I want to make monéy,” however, this is not a great motivator. Think of a deeper motivation that you feel passionate about e.g. “I want to have the financíal freedom to spend more time with my kids as they are growing up.”

2. What’s the Purpose of Your Website?

This is the question most visitors will ask when accessing your website. Your home page must clearly explain the purpose and benefits of the products and/or services you are offering.

3. What Type of Products or Services Will You Sell?

Research the marketability of your products or services by doing keyword research. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find out how many searches your main keywords receive every month. If there are no searches, it means there is not much demand and therefore not worth marketing.

If it is a very competitive market (millions of searches per month), it may be difficult to stand out from your competitors and create a profitable online business.

4. How Many Products Will You Sell From Your Website?

This will determine how many pages your website will have. If you’re only selling one product or service, you may only need 4 web pages e.g. Home, Product (or Services), About, Contact. If you’re selling 100s of items, you will need a database driven site to store and manage all of them.

5. How Many Variables Does Your Product Have?

Variables may include size, color, type, sku#, shipping, tax? Make sure your shopping cart allows you to include these variables.

6. How Will You Accept Online Payments?

To accept bank card payments online, you will need a shopping cart, merchant account, payment gateway and SSL certificate for secure transactions. This means you will have monthly fees and processing fees every time a customer purchases something from your website.

A less expensive option for accepting payments online is the Paypal shopping cart. You don’t need to purchase a separate merchant account, shopping cart, payment gateway and secure certificate. For a small processing fee it takes care of all this in one place.

7. Do You Have a Web Hosting Plan?

Your website needs to be hosted on a server for it to be available online. Select a hosting plan that has sufficient space for all your files and bandwidth to receive 1000s of visitors each month. Make sure you have the flexibility to upgrade your plan should you need more space and bandwidth.

8. Will You Need to Maintain the Website Yourself?

Asking this question before the design will determine what software your designer will use to build your website. If it only consists of a few web pages which don’t need regular updating, then use software such as Dreamweaver to build it. It creates clean code and you will have only a few files.

If your website has 100s of pages, consider a content management system such as WordPress, Joomla or Zen Cart. They all enable 100s of items to be stored in a database. The website can be managed (add, edit, or delete items or pages) by logging into an administration area.

9. Do You Have a Marketing Plan?

To create a profitable online business you must create a plan to promote it. Some methods may include, search engine marketing, pay-per-click, article marketing, press releases, social media, video marketing, etc. Website campaigning needs to be done frequently and consistently to be effective.

10. How Will You Monitor Your Website Statistics?

Check if your web hosting plan includes site statistics (e.g. AW Stats). If not, create a Google Analytics account and insert the code on your web pages. It will track how many daily, weekly, monthly, yearly visitors you receive, where they are coming from and what keywords are being used to find your site in the search engines.

If you answer these 10 questions first, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of designing and building a website and add to your potential of creating a profitable online business.

Could Facebook Even Survive Without Email?

Facebook thinks email is dying. Classic. How many times have we heard this now? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference recently, essentially claiming as much.

“In consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today, and the latest figures say that only 11% of teenagers email daily. So email (I can’t imagine life without it) is probably going away. So what do teenagers do? They SMS and increasingly they use social networking.”

First off, Facebook couldn’t exist without email. You need an email address to sign up and to log-in. Many of us rely on email for notifications from Facebook to know when someone has sent us a message, commented on our posts, invited us to an event, tagged us in a photo, etc. In fact, I’d be curious to see how frequently the average Facebook user would come back to Facebook daily without email notifications.

Email lubricates social interactions on Facebook, and I’d be very curious to see how successful Facebook would be without any email integration. I suspect it would die.

To be fair, Sandberg was looking to the future, and not the present when she made this claim. She even said that she couldn’t imagine life without email. It’s interesting, because Facebook is in some ways helping keep email relevant for the reasons mentioned above (though email certainly doesn’t need Facebook’s help to stay relevant).

Facebook requires you to use email to sign-up and log-in, but we are seeing more and more open protocols being used around the web for ID authentication. There are also not-so-open protocols in use, like Facebook Connect. I can log-in to a wide variety of sites/apps with my Facebook ID, but I can’t log-in to Facebook with anything other than my email address. If Facebok thinks email is dying, does that mean it will adopt some other open authentication protocols? Don’t these protocols generally come back to having an email address in the first place anyway?

The popularity of specific social networks comes and goes, but email has been around for a while, and has really shown no signs of going anywhere. Here’s something to consider – how many years has your inbox been flooded with spam? Has it caused you to use email any less? Granted, Facebook does continue to grow, even in the face of massive privacy concerns, but that’s hardly an indication that it could replace email. Sandberg didn’t suggest Facebook itself would replace email, but that SMS and social networking in general would. We’ll see. If Facebook hopes to be a significant part of that replacement on the social networking end, they’re probably going to have to play a little nicer with the open web movement.

I’ll come back to the conclusion we always reach. There is room for both email and social networks. Just like there is now, there will be in the future. As far as marketing is concerned, social networks appear to be greatly enhancing email campaigns. A recent study from GetResponse found that campaigns utilizing these networks were able to increase click-through-rates by 30%.

Since Twitter’s launch in 2007, it has seen huge growth and has become one of the dominant players when it comes to social media. If you’re trying to establish an online presence, and have no idea what Twitter is – or aren’t using it in some way to promote your brand – you haven’t been paying attention. Shame on you.

“Twittering” has become a national phenomenon with its use trailing slightly behind Facebook’s. Recently Twitter shared some interesting statistics at “Chirp”, the Twitter developer conference.

– 105,779,710 registered users of Twitter
– Approximately 55 million Tweets being sent daily
– 180 million unique visitors monthly
– Signing up 300,000 new users daily
– Twitter’s search engine getting 600 million searches daily

Another Report, “Twitter Usage in America: 2010″ by Edison Research, that presented three years of tracking date from national telephone surveys, found Twitter’s awareness has exploded from 5% of Americans in 2008 to 87% in 2010. Another stat shows that 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, products or brands on social networks. For the complete report see: http://edisonresearch.com/twitter_usage_2010.php.

Having said that, the problem all along has been how to take all of this growth and turn Twitter into a service that generates revenue. It has always been free to use, but like any company, Twitter’s objective is to make money. Enter “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter’s new advertising program. It’s very similar to Google Adwords. Advertisers bid on keywords and when a search is done on Twitter, triggering one of those keywords, an ád will be shown at the top of the results page – at least in phase one of the rollout. Only one promoted Tweet will be shown on the search results page.

In phase two of the roll out, the plan is to incorporate the ads into users Twitter streams, of course only when they’re relevant. Eventually, the ads will be syndicated via third party apps too. This is important considering a huge amount of Twitter users access the service using various types of software.

The ads are clearly marked as such, and at the bottom they say “promoted by advertisers name”, as well as being highlighted in yellow.

So what’s the plan for pricing? For now, advertisers will bid on keywords based on CPM’s (cost per thousand impressions), and viewers who will see the ád. Twitter plans on using something called “Resonance Score” to help determine how well the ads are being accepted by viewers. This score includes factors such as number of clicks the ad receives, how many times it is “retweeted”, number of people who reply to it, and how many people decide to follow you as a result of seeing the ád. A low resonance score will result in the ad being removed.

Twitter’s pricing model will eventually use the “Resonance Score” in some way down the road, but they first need to collect the data so they can “better understand the value of promoted Tweets.”

Before you get too excited, understand that the initial launch of Promoted Tweets is limited to a handful of customers. The Initial test pool includes customers such as: Starbucks, Bravo, Virgin America, Best Buy, Sony Pictures. These are big companies with very deep pockets.

Advertising to Twitter users is not a new concept. There are other third party advertising programs already in place, such as www.SponsoredTweets.com and http://paymetweets.com, among others, who have been selling ads in Twitter streams for a long time. How will Twitter’s new ad program affect them? Twitter recently announced they will not allow third parties to inject ads into timelines. A bold move on Twitter’s part, and putting them in a good position to be the dominant player when it comes to Twitter ads.

Everybody will be holding their breath to see how Twitter users respond to this new advertising program. Some feel it’s an invasion of their privacy, and other loyal users fear Twitter has sold out to “Commercialism”. Whatever your feelings, ads are coming to Twitter – and who can fault a company for trying to earn a profit.

Twitter is a valuable tool when it comes to promoting your brand and/or products online. Those who understand that won’t mind a few ads, those who don’t – well, they can just take their ball and go home [grin].

Local business listings began with a basic business directory more than a decade ago. Chances are, your business has a local listing wherever you have a physical address location.

Check it out — go to Google, type in your company name. You’ll probably see a map locating your business and an address. Of course you may find other information too.

Local business listings are treated passively by many businesses. But that could be a mistake. You’ve probably read that prospects have something specific in mind when they are shopping.

So try this test. Go back to Google, type in the name of a product or service your business provides plus your hometown. Did your business show up? If it did: congratulations. If it did not: you’re missing a major marketing opportunity.

Times have changed

From a marketing standpoint, the use of local business listings has exploded with the increase of social media and mobile devices. Consumers not only use these interactive yellow pages to locate a business, product or service in their area; they are also posting reviews of those products and services.

Today, there are over 60 local business listing websites on the Internet in five different categories. They include the search engines, social communities, 411 websites (aka yellow page type websites), GPS websites and that age-old business directory.

You can no longer be passive

To make your interactive yellow pages listing a stronger marketing tool, you must first “claim” the listing with all the search engines, social communities, websites and organizations that lead people to it. Once you prove the listing is really yours you can update it with your business marketing material.

Businesses are realizing the importance of this claiming process. Once you have claimed your local listing you can update information with text, keywords, business descriptions, products, services, photos, videos, coupons, and more. Some websites, such as Google, allow you to use all these options while others charge a fee for enhanced listings making this information present for local consumers through web or mobile searches.

So what’s the “security challenge”?

The claiming process is crucial to security because if the wrong person gets access to your business local listing they can direct customers to a different location by phone or website address.

Additional damage can include incorrect information on photos, videos, coupons, and more. Because consumers are using local business listings to locate a business, product or service in their immediate area, the security around local business listings must have a high priority for any local listing website.

Remember phishing?

Phishing was described in 1987 before the Internet was a commercial boom. The first recorded use of phishing was in 1996. The question is whether the business industry is going to wait for something similar to occur using Local Business Listings.

The security holes are quite evident with Local Business Listings and I don’t think it takes a genius see what could happen if businesses do not “claim” their listings — the first step in closing those “holes.”

When hackers capture a Local Listing it’s called “high-jacking”

It is absolutely important that businesses not passively wait for local listing websites to put the appropriate security in place before you claim your listing.

Installing security starts with the obvious claiming process, but many sites allow data to be inserted from other databases on the Internet and I am not sure there’s good security around this later process.

If someone wanted to hijack a local business listing, they could easily insert the wrong information through a low level business directory that sells its data upstream or inserts its data directly into a higher level local listing website.

While the top search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo have “some” front-end security; their API’s (Application Programming Interface) make them vulnerable through the back door.

Data is provided to their local listings from 3rd party sources including “get listed” services.

Additionally, if someone cannot claim a listing easily, the process within these local listing websites allows for additional listings with the same address to be submitted by anyone.

Quality Link Building is About the Long-Term

SEO changes all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms and user interfaces, users adopt new technologies, etc. Still some things never change, like Google’s view on spammy links.

The first piece of advice Google gives is to get involved with the community around your topic. If you were still not convinced that social media plays a very big role in search, consider this is coming straight from Google. Now the networks your community hangs out in may vary, but engaging with the community is simply a good way to get links and build credibility, which also will most likely lead to more links. Engaging is good for increasingly visibility outside of search anyway. Nothing new. Just reiterated by Google.

Sidenote: Listen to what Arnel Leyva of Covario has to say about search and social media from this recent interview WebProNews did with him at SMX Advanced:

Another tip Google suggests is to create content that solves problems for your users – things like tutorials, videos, and tools, surveys, research results, etc. Users who find helpful content are likely to pass it on.

Google notes that humor and other link-bait tactics can work for the short term, but does not recommend counting such tactics. “It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort,” says Google Search Quality Strategist Kaspar Szymanski. “There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.” (emphasis added)

“Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index,” says Szymanski. “There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit a site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.”

Szymanski also suggests looking to similar sites in other markets for inspiration – not to copy them, but to see the things that they have done to be successful and see if there is a way to apply that to your own site.

Finally, probably the most obvious tip offered here is to make it easy for people to share your content. Things like Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets can go a long way in creating new links to your content. Granted these won’t necessarily boost you “pagerank” but they will boost your visibility, which can lead to more quality links, and simply traffic, which is ultimately the goal anyway right?

“Build it and they will come” the saying goes.

Not.

You can build a blog or video site and you can still be lacking connections.

Connection is the nuclear core of social media. But you must make an effort in order for that to happen.

Whether you have a social media home busíness, traditional brick and mortar business, or an online business, you must get into the social trenches and connect and converse. It is that simple and that plain.

It is all about connecting and creating an engaging conversation with people that draws them towards you.

But why are people in social media not doing that?

Maybe they do not know this powerful 5 step “Avalanche Process” for getting new customers and keeping them in social media.

The first thing you must do is connect with the social media culture. It is what marketing is about in social media. Some people think that they can be anti-social in social media and think they can broadcast their message and people will still come.

That simply is not going to happen. Not in social media. You do not build ‘it’ but instead, build relationships that can become doorways and then eventually become customers.

Here is the “Avalanche Path” you can follow:

1) Connect –> 2) Conversation –> 3) Value –> 4) Doorway –> 5) Customer

Let’s take a quick look at each step:

1) Connect

Connection with people is where success in social media starts. Connect with people on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Youtube, on Orkut, or every other niche site out in the social sphere that matters. You must connect.

Here’s a little tip:

Connect to those who are looking for you. They will find you if you are visible, and accessible to
connect to.

2) Conversation

This step is where the conversation with people starts. You talk about the prospect and where they want to go. You talk about what they want to talk about. You study their profile, pictures and videos on their social sites because you can learn a lot just by paying attention.

Then make sure that you stay in touch and listen when they are communicating with you. If you do that, they will want to stay connected to you.

3) Value

This step is where you bring in the magnet to pull them towards your message. Show them value they can obtain with your message in their life. Show them how your message can help expand, broaden, enlarge and improve their life. You do it through tips and how to’s in videos and blog posts and podcasts, as well as tweets and twips. Show them how you can make their life easier and show them how to do something they want to learn. You show them how to be or do something. If you can expand the size of their dreams, you can get them as a customer.

The more value people perceive you have for them the more likely they will walk through the “Doorway.”

4) Doorway

This is the doorway to conversion where you convert them to a customer. You must convert prospects into customers if you are going to have any kind of business. That is simple to do.

Give them an offér where “No” is impossible to say. That is the secret. Give first and then make the proposition so compelling they cannot say “No.” We do it all the time. We just ran a social media special on our training products and it blew the roof off our shipping department. It has created a flood of new customers and new orders for us. All we did was give them an offer that was difficult to turn down.

The secret of success we experienced can be found in the word “Give.”

Give away something they must have, and something that will improve their life, and they will get it.

5) Customer

This final step is where they purchase your message, products, or webinar or event. This is the beginning of your relationship though – not the end.

Here you must start building the relationship between you and the customer even more.

Give more than they expected and throw something in for free they were not expecting. Give them a free download or ebook and let them see a Private video collection as a special.

Encourage more. Make sure that you send a note of encouragement and stay in touch with them.

Thank them more. Make sure they know you are thankful for their business and connection. We send out free downloads all the time to say thanks that some people paid $$$ for in the past. Thank them in everything you do and they will come back for more.

Get your customers addicted to your Value, Message and Emotions. They will become more than a customer. They will become a loud speaker for you and tell everybody you know you are the best at what you do.

That is what you want to happen in your home busíness or traditional business in social media marketing.

A number of major media companies are starting to implement tools for third-party authentication for consumers. We spoke with JanRain, which provides a tool called Engage that companies like Tribune Interactive, Meredith, E.W. Scripps, The Dallas Morning News, bizjournals, and the National Geographic Society are all using. With the solution, publishers can authenticate users via third-party logins using as many as 16 different providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo LinkedIn, etc.

“JanRain is helping these companies to garner traffic to their site via the social web,” a representative for the company tells WebProNews. She also says Engage can let media companies “allow consumers to publish content back to the social networks, increasing the cycle of referral traffic, and capture important demographic data to improve the user experience.”

“Traffic to your website from a social media platform is, by its very nature, more valuable than traffic from other sources,” she adds. “People spend time on social networks for the purpose of sharing information with people they deem important. Trust is high among peers; recommendations and messages exchanged among friends are more likely to resonate than those directly from a company.”

“A goal for any site is to have a visitor login or register, becoming an engaged user and interacting more – making a purchase, posting content, etc. Once a user is engaged, make it easy for them to communicate back to the social networks of their choice without leaving your site,” she continues. “Activity-based social publishing tools enable the user to perform this action from within the flow of your website experience. A user finds something of interest on your website and then calls it out to their community.”

“The engaged user is an effective filter both for their community and your website. When a user decides to share information back to a social network, it is a win for their contacts and your organization,” she concludes. “The circle of referral traffic begins. As the user shares their activity or content from your site to friends on a social network, the post from the initial engaged user drives traffic back to your site, some of whom will login and publish their own activities back to their networks, and so on. Many organizations leveraging this functionality are experiencing 6-25 new referral visitors for each social action a user shares with friends. As this cycle repeats, these organizations create a direct link to the social web and a sustaining stream of new referred visitors.”

In another article, we compared the value of social interactions with content through social networks to comments on the content themselves. There is no question that the social networks can provide additional value.

Google announced that it is putting all of its non-search display advertising offerings together into one network called the Google Display Network.

Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management explains the reasoning behin this on the Inside AdWords blog: “Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We’ve rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties.”

“The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads),” he continues. “The Google Display Network offers all ad formats – text, image, rich media, and video ads – enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web.”

Nothing has changed about the way advertisers run ads. AdWords bidding and reservations for YouTube and Google Finance, for example, will be the same.

Google says that in the coming weeks, you’ll see a change in the AdWords interface that reflects the new Google Display Network brand.