Our work in lead generation and social media marketing give us a unique perspective on two different dynamics that are at play in the world of interactive marketing.

The first is the idea of creating a brand online.  This is like going shopping for a new set of fancy clothes.  You start with the intention, I want to look good, and then you keep trying on clothing until you look pretty much the way that you want.  (Or, you think that you look the way that you want, but that’s another story…some of us can’t ever quite get there.)

For web marketing, this means getting the kind of look and feel, feature set and whiz-bang cool things that let you say that your web site is a pretty cool looking set of duds.

Of course, you factor in practical considerations.  After all, just like when you go shopping for clothing, you’ve got to stay reasonably close to your budget, and you’ve got to be able to sit down in it.  But, when push comes to shove, you are going to err in the direction of your heart.

The second is the challenge of converting online visitors into prospects and customers.  This, after all, is the paramount benefit of the internet, that you can provide prospective customers with the kind of information that they need in order to determine whether to work with you or buy your product.

This is nothing like buying a suit of clothes.  This is like trying to find recruit athletes to a Division III college.  You can’t give them a scholarship, you can’t influence admissions, but you need them to believe that you can give them a better experience than anyone else.  It’s about capturing interest, holding on to it and closing the sale at the right time.

That’s an entirely different kind of web experience.  Your web site isn’t designed on the basis of aesthetics; it has to be designed on the basis of data.  What are the images, information points and links that cause your users to take an action that is of an economic  benefit for you?

For most of us in business, that action is a phone call or a visit to our place of business.  And when the prospect already has gotten information that is important to them and decided to reach out and contact you, you have the highest odds of making that  prospect a customer.

As we’ve worked over the past year and a half with local businesses, we’ve discovered that there is a tremendous lack of understanding as to how to use a web site in order to create qualified prospects.  And, as we’ve  built social media footprints for our clients, and developed broader distribution of their content that has elevated their natural search traffic, we’ve found that very few have reliable processes for tracking and capturing those users.

Where do you start as a small business?  With taking the time to understand the simplest attributes of web tracking.  Anyone in business can use the Analytics tool from Google in order to track the activity on their web site.  That is your starting point.  If you are able to answer how many people are visiting your web site, what kind of things they look at most frequently, and how many of them are sending you additional inquiries, either in person, by phone or on e-mail, then you have the beginning of the information that will help you decide how to make your web site more than a pretty set of clothes.

I do.

The first time I got this question, I was surprised and took a second to answer.

Of course I write it, I thought. My name is on it.

When I asked people why they asked, they said that they loved the blog, but figured that I had other people writing under my direction. I was a CEO, after all.

The question prompted two thoughts.

First, we all have different styles of thinking and communicating. I write, so when I hit on something that I’m interested or puzzled about, my inclination is to try to get it down on paper and see whether it makes sense. I can go through my old files and find documents that I have written at different key moments in my career that laid out what I was seeing and how it sorted out.

This blog simply offers a platform to share some of those things. I write it because that’s what I do…write.

The second thought stems from that last point: a lot of people have things to say, but they aren’t people who write. There’s nothing wrong with that; we all have our different styles.

Those people who have things to say but aren’t people who write shouldn’t be left out of the power of using content and social media to communicate. And, people don’t expect them to be left out. When people asked me whether I wrote this blog or not, the question wasn’t pejorative. They don’t expect CEO’s to write, but they do expect them to have something to say.

Two years ago, when I began seriously exploring how businesses were using social media tools to market, I was struck by this basic inequity: the benefits of social media accrued to the people who could write, not necessarily the people who were the best at doing the work of their business. People who were facile with content and technology could stamp out daunting digital footprints, taking mindshare and traffic away from other, potentially more expert and more deserving businesses.

This was the problem we decided to try to solve when we launched the DigitalSherpa line of services: Can you make content marketing using social media tools accessible to local businesses? The purpose was to help level the playing field, to give people who had something to say but lacked the skills to say it a toolkit.

We’ve had some success and are learning along the way. I’m constantly struck, though, by people who look at businesses and say, If you don’t do social media yourself, then you’re not doing it the right way. That statement has an elitist and exclusive air. The real question that all of us should be trying to contribute solutions to is how to make the power of social media marketing available to any business, regardless of how good they are at writing and interacting and sharing.

Any small business looking at social media ultimately has to ask, What business benefit am I going to get from being active in this media? No matter how compelling the user statistics are, any commitment of time for a small business needs to be rewarded with results.

I thought it would be useful to share a detailed case study on how one small business has leveraged a content marketing and social networking strategy to drive measurable business results.

Situation:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. Established in 1994, the agency has developed a particular expertise serving accounts in the financial services, lifestyle and media sectors. TMG is focused on creating broad-based communications programs that convey the distinctive attributes of brands and help drive business results. [Disclosure: The principal of TMG Brand Communications, Tami McCarthy, is my wife.]

The company’s purpose is summed up on its website.

The thrill of developing a brand’s personality, giving it a voice of authority in the market and having it resonate and drive a target audience to act or think differently inspires everything that we do at TMG Brand Communications.

Over the past several years, TMG has developed a suite of skills in internet and social media marketing. One of its most notable initiatives was the integration of social media with a live webcast to launch the Citi Forward card from client Citi Cards. (A description of the project from social media maven Mack Collier can be found here.)

Not surprisingly, TMG had not developed a plan to leverage its social media marketing expertise to elevate its own profile. Tami was an early adopter of social media platforms, with an active presence on Twitter and profiles on services like Facebook and LinkedIn, but had not developed an integrated strategy for using these tools to benefit the agency.

Like many of its peers, TMG did have an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and a sample of its work. However, the site was lightly trafficked. Most of the visitors came directly to the site, driven by TMG’s distribution of its URL on its business cards and stationary.

Tactics:

In the last quarter of 2009, TMG decided to develop an integrated strategy to use social media marketing to elevate its brand presence.

The strategy was designed to add a content marketing component to an already active social networking presence. In addition, the strategy linked personally-branded social networking activity on platforms like Twitter and Facebook with the digital identities of the overall agency.

In order to accomplish the strategy, TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, buzzcloud.tmgpr.com, was set up using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application was used to distribute blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.

A general content outline was developed in order to give focus to the blog posts. Tami is the sole author of the posts. The purpose of the posts is to share observations and suggestions about topical communications challenges. The content only peripherally touches on TMG clients. In addition, the content plan assumed that new posts would be created every two weeks or so, so that the burden of creating content didn’t weigh down an already highly-productive team.

Results:

Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud was launched in November 2009. Results for the subdomain buzzcloud.tmgpr.com were tracked separately from the results for the www.tmg-media.com domain so that the impact of the new content strategy could be accurately measured.

That impact was immediate.

In the six months following the launch of the blog, TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%.

Hidden within this gain are a couple of data points that demonstrate the impact of a well-executed content marketing and social networking program.

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period.

After launching Buzzcloud, TMG became much more visible on search engines, particularly Google. TMG became visible because it began to publish original content with more frequency. Each of those blog posts were distributed into TMG’s digital footprint, and as people clicked through to the site, or redistributed the content their own digital footprint, TMG began to develop a broader network of digital breadcrumbs, all of which led Google and other search engines back to the TMGpr.com web site.

Increased web traffic to the agency site was not the only indirect benefit of the social media marketing program. The digital footprint of both TMGpr and Tami McCarthy expanded dramatically, generating increased brand heft and awareness.

The easiest way to assess the heft of a brand’s digital footprint is to type the name into Google. The phrases “TMGpr” and “Tami McCarthy” both return relevant results that dominate the first page of Google.

Most people who are interested in you or your company are likely to search for you on the web. A Google search that returns a page filled with relevant links creates an aura of credibility and authority for your brand. It isn’t enough for those links to exist, however; behind them there needs to be useful and relevant information, the kind of search outcome that is Google’s brand promise.

This program has not required an incredible amount of time to execute. The most time-consuming aspect is creating the original posts. Maintaining the social networking presence is a matter of intermittent focus; TMG uses Facebook and Twitter to share interesting content, give personal updates and re-distribute content that other people have created.

What’s fascinating about this case study is how important the creation of content has been to driving overall web traffic.

During the six-months ending November 2009. TMG executed its social networking program actively. It did not, however, have an active blog. As a result, the social networking had virtually no effect on the company’s web traffic.

Launching the blog and publishing content drove a tremendous amount of traffic.

One lesson is that social networking without content marketing will not drive clearly measurable results for your business.

Of course, the big question is whether this activity has any impact on your business results.

For TMG, social media marketing has helped to drive increased visibility, more business inquiries and ultimately more account. Go take a look at the agency’s blog to see just how much.

An Emarketer analysis this week of two research studies concluded that social media was going to be a big focus on web marketing expansion by small businesses.

Our experience on the ground selling our DigitalSherpa service confirms the direction of the surveys.  Once we get into a discussion about how content marketing and digital networking can help their firm, local business people quickly move past questions about “why” to questions about “how?”

There’s a fundamental problem, though, that the research doesn’t get at.  Local businesses don’t have an interactive strategy that is geared to acquiring and converting qualified leads.

In most aspects of local business marketing, the lack of sophistication around leads acquisition and conversion isn’t that important.  But in internet marketing, it’s critical.

Take a look at the research first.  According to the “Third Annual FedEx Office Signs of the Times Small Business Survey” (that’s a mouthful), use of social media is the fastest growing tactic small business owners cite in their marketing planning.  The primary area of focus continues to be improving online presence, signaling that SMB owners consider this an area where improvement can is needed.

eMarketer then cites a Constant Contact study that shows that websites and e-mail marketing are the two most prevalent tactics or tools that SMB owners rely on to market their business.

The high penetration of Facebook makes for an attention-getting headline, but the nuts and bolts of the marketing program are in the website and continuing contact to the prospect and customer database.

The challenge is how these SMB owners are making decisions about the effectiveness of these tactics.

It doesn’t sound hard:  track web traffic, measure leads and conversions and then select the most efficient sources.

But making these kind of analytical decisions are challenges to the largest businesses in America.  Another recent survey concluded that the biggest obstacle to effective web tracking at larger companies was finding the talent to do the analytics.  If large companies can’t get to the answer, how can small companies expect to?

In traditional marketing campaigns, these kind of analytics were not as important.   A local marketing initiative drove the consumers to one of two places:  a phone number or a physical location.  At the other end of the interaction was a real person, who would ask questions, engage and impart information.  The interaction was more discursive and exploratory, and the experience of the person representing the business in adapting answers to the knowledge and personality of the person asking was critical to driving sales.

With web marketing a primary goal of the program is to drive a person to a web site where they can get information that will inspire them to either act directly or reach out for more information.

If that web site isn’t designed the right way, then you’re not going to get the return on your investment that you should expect.

One of the things that we’ve learned in our business is that creating a web site that can drive conversions is a science, not an art.  Like any science, it requires constant experimentation and adaptation.

The challenge facing SMB’s is not just putting focus on internet marketing; it’s figuring out how to find partners who have the knowledge, expertise and interest to help them participate in a science that challenges even the largest firms.

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The landscape for local advertising, particularly by small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) is undergoing a profound shift that is being masked in part by the overall downturn in advertising spending, two recent research reports from BIA/The Kelsey Group demonstrates. The key for local media companies is to segment the SMB client base in relation to their adoption of online media. And the key to that adoption rate is the age of the company, Kelsey concludes.

To put the entire opportunity in context, it’s useful to revisit BIA/Kelsey‘s U.S. Local Media Forecast, released earlier this year, where BIA/Kelsey chronicled a devastating decline in local advertising spend in 2009 and 2010. The firm doesn’t anticipate any recovery until 2011, nor any real strengthening of the local ad market until 2012.

That is more than $27 billion of local advertising that will have evaporated during the recession. Within this macro trend, a fundamental secular shift is underway, says points out Polachek, president of BIA/Kelsey

“The general economic conditions worsened during 2009 causing advertising dollars to remain on the sidelines as businesses — large and small, local, regional and national — reined in spending levels,” said Polachek. “Even with improvements in the overall economy, we do not anticipate a rapid recovery among traditional media over the forecast period, because we believe the structural change in the local media industry has accelerated.”

This structural change is highlighted in BIA/Kelsey’s most recent update to its Local Commerce Monitor, a local tracking study that the firm has been doing over the past several years.

The ground-level research of SMBs reinforces the overall outlook for local advertising.

The Local Commerce Monitor study also revealed a decrease in overall ad spending by SMBs, owing to unfavorable economic conditions and the long-term substitution of traditional media with lower-cost digital/online media. SMBs decreased spending on advertising and promotion by 23.5 percent, from $2,734 annually (reported in August 2008) to $2,092 annually (reported in August 2009). In spite of the overall decrease in spending on advertising and promotion over the past 12 months, on average, SMBs increased spending on Web sites and profile pages by 26.8 percent, from $608 in 2008 to $769 in 2009.

Kelsey does chronicle on notable shift among SMBs: they have personally begun to use more digital media than traditional media. This usage shift will drive accelerate the shift in marketing purchases, BIA/Kelsey contends.

The younger the business, the more likely they are to spend heavily on internet advertising, BIA/Kelsey points out. Businesses less than 3 years old will spend close to 1/3 of their budget on internet, while businesses more than 10 years old will spend only 13%.

The obvious conclusion, Kelsey points out, is to target younger businesses with digital offerings.

The success rate is likely to be much higher.

The dollars at stake are meaningful.

Indeed, a steady shift toward digital media continues. BIA/Kelsey forecasts spending on traditional media to decline from $115 billion in 2009 to $108.2 billion in 2014 (CAGR of -1.2 percent). During the same period, spending on online/interactive media is projected to grow from $15.2 billion to $36.7 billion (CAGR of 19.3 percent).

Over the next five years, a focus on emerging businesses as the foundation of digital growth is a strategy that is likely to be rewarded.

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More than 50% of marketers believe they will generate quantifiable results from their social media activities in 2010, but there’s little consensus on what to measure, according to Datran Media’s “4th Annual Marketing & Media Survey” as reported by eMarketer.

An earlier eMarketer roundup had shown that the base level tracking that most people apply to their social media marketing program is website traffic.

Datran’s respondents—who are heavily invested in the social space, with about 72% having Facebook and Twitter profiles—were most likely to track all their online campaigns based on clicks (72%), conversions (59.2%) and impressions (58.4%). Conversions were considered the most important metric to track.

The challenge for most marketers, including small businesses, is that very few have good tracking metrics set up for their web sites.

To understand the impact of a good content marketing and social media program, you need to understand two things: where you traffic is coming from and how that traffic converts into customers.

The means detailing your different sources of traffic and tracking the number of people who come to your site, reach out to you and then buy something.

The challenge that social media marketing programs add is that your sources become much more organic and complex, and it is much more challenging to identify what activity is driving what traffic.

Last week my colleague Todd Dubner was at The Kelsey Group Marketplaces Conference talking about our DigitalSherpa service.

You can see his summary of his comments and some of the reactions on his blog Being Present. It’s an interesting read.

After about 9 months of selling, we have about 1000 clients to our DigitalSherpa services, so we’ve been learning a lot about what works, what doesn’t and how to communicate effectively with clients. We’ve taken our lumps and have had some remarkable success stories, all part of launching a brand new business.

Todd does a good job of describing our core premise with the service in this quote:

Here was the premise of the presentation was that local media has always been about high touch service at an affordable price. We can look at NCI’s history with The Real Estate Book to see that in action. In the early days we were not just a media provider, but truly a full-service provider. Our interaction with our customer often began with taking photos of a house, included production of a 4 color advertisement and concluded with printing and targeted distribution of a magazine – an awesome value, priced today at ~$400 a page.

Now we are offering a local social media marketing tool that is designed in the same light. Our customers recognize that there is likely to be value in establishing an active presence in Facebook and Twitter and understand that having a current, active, blog-like web presence is better than an old (dusty) static web page.

You can see Todd’s entire presentation below:

Edward Boches of Creativity Unbound asked some influential folks who went to SxSW what was their one big takeaway from the conference.

Kristina Halverson, CEO of Brain Traffic spoke to the readiness on the client side to make process changes that will enable content marketing strategies.

“My takeaway? Clients are ready to coordinate their currently siloed interactive marketing initiatives–social media, SEO, web and email communications, and so on—by creating a content strategy that defines and drives their content and its lifecycle processes. The larger implication is that organizations will need to reinvent themselves as publishers, creating new infrastructures to support the ongoing creation and care of relevant, quality content.”

Embedded in this well-crafted quote is a broad range of new skills and processes that are going to take a lot of work to establish within all kinds of organizations.

I was struck by this late last week as I met with one of our social media teams. This group is focused on implementing the social media applications platform that we’ve developed with our DigitalSherpa line of products.

My focus was to dig in on results: The actual results that were being delivered, the results that clients were able to define they wanted and the degree to which our dialogue with the clients was aligned.

As we spoke, it was clear that most of our clients had very little understanding of the broad impact that creating consistent, relevant digital content would have on their digital footprint and web activity. As a result, the client service focus was on activities that, in the grand scheme of things, were tangential to the ultimate benefits they would receive from the service.

This is a manageable disconnect, requiring us to focus more closely on education, training and innovative measurements. But it is a disconnect nonetheless.

Across all of our markets, I am seeing a increased focus on driving web-based business activity. But within that emphasis, I see very little understanding of how to create web footprints that are designed to convert activity in leads; of how to use social media tools to increase your content presence on the web; and to what degree social networking can be used to enhance your connection with those prospect, clients and business peers who are interested in being part of your social community.

The transition that Halverson sees coming is more than the addition of functional roles. To fully leverage a digital content strategy requires a seemless alignment of content focus across all parts of the marketing spectrum, and highly coordinated execution — including information sharing — between all of the different constituents who are managing the content, including the traditional advertising functions.

The marketers who do that the best will have creative and literate marketing leaders who are able to tell a story, let it acquire dimension and let it loose from the defined constraints of a brand. This is the stuff of folklore meshed into marketing, and the thought of that evolution is unsettling, no matter how oriented you are to the potential of social media tools

Over the past year, the team at NCI has been developing a social marketing service under the umbrella of Digital Sherpa for local advertisers. The service was launched commercially into the multi-family market last August and into the home design market in December.

Our attention over the past months has been focused on executing on our value proposition for our clients. The core of the proposition is to leverage social media tools and content creation and curation in order to expand a customer’s digital footprint. The outcome is increased web traffic through improved Google juice and increased connectedness with their community of interest.

To execute these propositions at a low monthly price to our customers while delivering measurable results, we’ve been building and fine-tuning our business processes and bringing on board a group of talented and enthusiastic professionals excited to pioneer the next wave of internet marketing.

Our activities attracted the attention of a leading analyst in the local media space, Peter Krasilovsky, who heads up the Marketplaces advisory service at The Kelsey Group. Peter asked to look under the hood and has issued summary report about DigitalSherpa.

Here’s how he framed the report in his alert to clients:

Will vertical advertising be replaced, in whole or in part, by search engine optimization? That’s the question companies are grappling with as they consider that many leads are coming from articles and other media that rank high in search results.

NCI, the publisher of The Real Estate Book, Apartment Finder and other publications, isn’t waiting to find out. Throwing worries of cannibalism to the wind, it is building social media content for its advertisers, placing highly contextual articles, abstracts, photos and video on advertiser blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

In his report, Peter poses 5 key questions about the Digital Sherpa service:

1. Will “content” be a compelling proposition of potential clients, even though the big SMB bets for 2010 are reputation and presence management?
2. Will DigitalSherpa experience the same high churn that other local internet ad services have experienced with SMB’s?
3. Can DigitalSherpa develop effective content?
4. How much content does a service need to develop in order to deliver results to its clients?
5. What impact will creating DigitalSherpa have on our core customer relationships?

These are great questions. I’m not going to take a stab at answering them now. With close to 1000 clients currently, we’ve going to have data-driven answers to the questions in fairly short order. That will be the time to see how things shake out in this social media marketing experiment.

The Kelsey Report advisory alert is available to subscribers here. If you have questions for Peter, you can find him at his blog, The Local Onliner.

eMarketer shared an interesting piece of research from the University of Maryland’s business school this week.

The survey looked at the use of social media tactics by small business.

The key takeaway: Small businesses are rapidly adopting social media. 75% have created a company presence on sites like Facebook and 69% say that they actively post status updates and articles of interest on those sites.

Twitter was used by about one quarter of the respondents, while almost 40% say that they blog.

This is an explosion of activity from the SMB sector. It makes sense: social media tools are easy to use and internet users are spending more time on social media sites than any other venue. The SMB social media adopters are just following their customers.