We have all seen the recent commercials Bing has launched claiming to be a better search engine than Google by offering blind tests to pedestrians around San Francisco, right? Whether you fancy Google or Microsoft's search engine, the fact remains that some people do use other search engines than the all mighty Google. So how can you optimize your website for Bing, and what’s that other search engine? Oh yeah...Yahoo! Well, In a guest post at MarketingProfs' Daily Fix, Amanda DiSilvestro says that it takes little effort, and it might yield profitable results:

Bing-specific keyword research will take some time, she said, but the differences from Google are minor:

• Domain age. "Bing puts more emphasis on domain age than Google," she notes. "If you have an older domain, you're already on your way! That was easy, right?"
• Titles. Microsoft's search engine also puts a greater emphasis on title tags; be sure your title includes your keyword.
• Flash. While Google is fairly hostile to Flash, Bing doesn't mind, and a Flash-heavy site should perform well.

Now we're getting to the really easy part. Once you've optimized for Bing, you've also optimized for Yahoo! "Yahoo results are powered by Bing," DiSilvestro explains. "In other words, if you're optimizing for Google first and Bing second, your third-search engine is pretty darn simple."

Aside from these differences that Amanda stated, Microsoft's search engine also loves outbound links while Google does not really pay attention to them. It won’t hurt to add outbound links to your dealership’s blog to rank organically on this search engine.

Dealer Take Away: Don’t be narrowly focused just on Google, if you pay a little attention to Microsoft's search engine you’ll also gain Yahoo! prospects. If you need help on some easy ways to SEO your website, check out my previous blog SEO 101 and if you took the  blind test, share your results in the comment section below!

Twitter recently announced some improvements for their advertising platform,  including the ability to choose which tweet you promote and reporting of follower growth. Manually selecting a Promoted Tweet lets you can pick exactly which Tweets you want to go out, allowing for a much deeper integration of paid media in any brand’s Twitter strategy. According to Socialfresh.com  there are 3 reasons why this matters to market your brand:

1. Brands asked for more

Users now can now check existing engagement and demographic stats against their follower growth. The update doesn’t turn the Twitter backend into anything like SimplyMeasured, Radian6 or the like, but it’s not that bad. The important thing is people asked, and Twitter eventually delivered. Now, if only they could figure out that developer thing…

2. Keeping up with the Joneses

As we see Twitter move into the mainstream as a widely adopted channel for communication, they needed to figure out someway to continue to bring comparable value to their advertisers like the big blue elephant in the room (which many would argue has its own set of issues).

3. The Hashtag Explosion

If you haven’t noticed, hashtags are pretty popular.  From bringing people together in Twitter Chats to being used as slang or inside jokes, the hashtag is used by nearly every demographic group on the site.

For a better example, look no further than the X-Factor!

According to Twitter’s Blog:
The show’s new lineup of judges, including Britney Spears, Demi Lovato, Simon Cowell and L.A. Reid, have embarked on a race to see who is America’s favorite “The X Factor” judge based upon who can get their hashtag trending first.
Britney Spears – @BritneySpears – #ItsBritney
Demi Lovato – @ddlovato – #QueenD
Simon Cowell – @SimonCowell – #MrNiceGuy
L.A. Reid – @LA_Reid – #ImEpic

Brands large and small have been using the promoted tweets and promoted account products to help grow engagement, drive traffic to promoted URLs, and get more followers on Twitter.

Have you tried out Twitter advertising yet or are trying to implement it in your strategy?

*Blog was originally posted at http://blog.activengage.com/2012/10/twitter-brand-tools/

If you aren’t too keen on search engine optimization, I’m here to help you whether you’re going to SEO your website yourself or outsource it. First thing's first, you must always have a strategy.

Pre-Plan
Search engines consider a number of factors when determining how to index. For example, the way the pages of your site link together (i.e. the information architecture) will determine how easy it is for search engines to crawl and index. Also, the speed at which your pages load is a strong signal to search engines about the usability of your site.

Keyword Research
What are customers typing into search engines in order to find you? You need to know what content is most appropriate to your target audience and what they are looking for. You also need to know what title to give your homepage, your product pages, your category pages, etc.

Keyword research is the process of finding out which search terms to go after to maximise the amount of traffic and, more importantly, conversions (form leads, sign-ups etc.) that your site attracts.
You can use the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool to retrieve approximate search volumes and ranking difficulty for each keyword and to get keyword suggestions.

Competitor Analysis
Once you’ve come up with some terms and headlines, it’s time to see how your competition ranks in relation to those keywords. Make sure you are signed out of Google when you search for each term to see which dealerships show up on the first page or else your search result will be biased.

Content Strategy
Simply replicating what your competitors are doing isn’t going to get you ranked above them any time soon. Search engines love fresh content, so create a blog and draft social media posts at least twice a week. Try creating buyer personas profiles, for your ideal customers, in order to help you decide how you would go about addressing those customers’ concerns or filling their needs. Do your ideal customers have a salary of over six figures? What are their paint points? Why do they usually buy from you? Answering these types of questions will help you build your buyer personas.

There you have it! Remember, improving your search engine rank by SEOing your website doesn’t happen overnight. Give search engines the time to process your website, I’d say at least a week or so and check to see where you rank.

Do you have any suggestions for improving SEO ranking? Please share them in the comments section below!

There is more to email than just having great content, the perfect subject line, and having a perfect layout. What about spam filters? When it comes to your email being filtered, the Return Path Sender Reputation Report identified the following key factors ISPs consider:  IP Reputation, Infrastructure and Content.

Here is what  Tonya Mitchell Consultant, Deliverability Consulting at Return Path Sender had to say about it:

Filters “learn” information over time based on the spammy versus legitimate mail it has seen come through its system.  They also consider the feedback from the end users regarding whether or not messages have been marked as spam.  So while content filtering may only come into play 17% of the time, it’s still valuable to understand the various types of spam filters where your message could get caught.

There are three major levels of enterprise spam filtering:  hosted, gateway and desktop.   Hosted spam filters are companies that have developed a proprietary method of using content and reputation metrics to identify spam versus legitimate mail.  Since these spam filters have a large book of clients using their service, they have a broader scope of information to use in their decision making process to determine whether to deliver to the inbox, spam or quarantine folder, or to block it completely.  Hosted spam filters can include technology that is integrated by vendors directly into their own products.   Examples of hosted spam filters include Brightmail, Cloudmark, MessageLabs, and Postini.  According to Return Path Sender’s latest benchmark report, these hosted spam filters only delivered email to the inbox 86% of the time.  Some of these hosted spam filters are more difficult than others to pass through.  Postini is the most challenging filter with only 47.55% of emails being delivered as you can see in the table below.

Gateway spam filters are physical servers with software that are installed at the border of a company’s network.  All mail attempting to come into your company must pass through this “gate” before it can enter your system. This spam filter is learning what it deems as spam based on all the email coming into your company, thus having less email to learn from than the hosted spam filter.  Examples of a gateway spam filter include IronPort and Barracuda.

The desktop spam filter lives on the end users computer.  It is highly customizable by the individual so is often seen as one of the more difficult filters to pass through. An example of a desktop spam filter is Outlook.  Outlook uses Microsoft’s anti-spam filter SmartScreen, which also looks at reputation, to help filter email.  SmartScreen uses the feedback from Windows Live Hotmail users to help distinguish legitimate emails from spam.
While the triggers for each content spam filter can vary, the following are some best practices to help reduce your chances of getting caught in the various content spam filters:

Rule Out Reputation. Most of the filters mentioned above also measure IP reputation.  You should first verify that your issues aren’t due to IP reputation first before testing content:
Return Path Sender Score:  http://www.senderscore.org
Brightmail: http://ipremoval.sms.symantec.com/lookup/
Microsoft SmartScreen:  https://postmaster.live.com/snds/
Ironport: http://www.senderbase.org/
Barracuda:  http://www.barracudacentral.org/lookups
Postini:  http://www.google.com/postini/headeranalyzer/

Dealer Take Away

Test, test, test.  Once you identify that your content is being flagged by spam filters, you should continue testing to isolate what is causing the issues, such as subject lines, URLs/links, text and images.  Content testing can be a time consuming process as you’ll want to test the various message components separately until you identify what is passing and failing the spam filter.  Also, check to see if any of your URLs are on URL blacklists, like URIBL and SURBL.

Have a balance between text and images in your message. Don’t create a message with one large image as this is a spammer technique used in attempt to bypass spam filters.  Embedding large images in emails or using a lot of graphics can also slow the email servers’ ability to process mail.  As a result, content spam filters will often flag such emails and stop delivery.  Not to mention images are off by default at most ISPs so you won’t be getting your message across anyway.

Don’t use URL shorteners. A URL shortner is a tool that takes your full URL and creates a small version of it to place in content, like bit.ly and tinyurl for example.  Since URL shorteners are commonly used by phishers and spammers, they are usually blocked by content spam filters.

Ever since I attended the B2B Marketing Sherpa Summit at the end of August,  I’ve been following Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s latest articles and observations. Today, I came across an article on Transparent Marketing that I believe is worth sharing with you all.

Back in the late 1800s there was a product named Modoc Oil that promised to cure all your ailments in one minute. Here is the original sales copy printed in a local paper at the time:
"Modoc Oil – The greatest medicine on earth. It has no equal. It relieves all pain instantly:Toothache in one minute – Headache in one minute – Earache in ten minutes – Sore Throat in one night –Neuralgia in from three to five minutes."

Sounds pretty bogus to us now, but back then the demand for this oil was so high that the company had to build a new plant that encompassed an entire block. That demand was so high because people trusted and believed its message, but today that’s a different story. Let’s take a look at some statistics before we move on:

• The average person is assaulted with a barrage of 577 new marketing messages per week.

• Statistics indicate that we retain less than 1% of the marketing messages we encounter

And here’s the bad news as Dr. McGlaughlin puts it, “The Post Modern Consumer just doesn't believe us anymore. They have endured too many empty promises, too many exaggerated benefits, and too many artful disclaimers.”

So how can we get this skeptical generation to accept and respond to our marketing message? By using Transparent Marketing. As Dr. McGlaughlin states:

1. Tell (only) the (verifiable) Truth
The task is challenging. First, we must strip our ad copy of every last info fragment that is not absolutely accurate. Then, we must go back and strip it again, this time of every fragment that is not absolutely verifiable.

Here is a direct quote from the mission statement of HealthWidgets.Com:
"We consider respect, trust and integrity to be essential in all our dealings. We expect honest, ethical behavior from ourselves, and we encourage it in others."

Fine sounding words, but despite the noble tone, their message will likely be discarded. If the Post Modern Consumer can't instantly verify a claim, they will assume that it is false.

2. Purge all vague modifiers.
Let's take a pair of surgical scissors to the MediWidgets pitch. Let's cut away the subjective adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases.
"Led by ______________________ management teams in the industry, MediWidgets has _________ demonstrated a _________ understanding of the industry and a ___________ vision for its future. This vision translated into a concept of a ____________ system - of how patients should move _________ through a _______ healthcare system that offers _____________________."

Question: What do we have left? Answer: Not much.

What is this copy saying? How will it impact a prospect?
Here is a paraphrase of the remaining paragraph, along with the likely responses of a weary decision maker as he scans for meaning.

• Info-Fragment 1: MediWidgets is led by a management team. (So what. So is every other company)
• Info-Fragment 2: MediWidgets has demonstrated an understanding of the industry and it's future. (Yeah, yeah, yeah. Says who? How have they demonstrated this "understanding?")
• Info-fragment 3: MediWidgets has designed a system for moving patients through a healthcare system. (What are these people talking about? What do they really do? How can they help me?)

3. Let someone else do your bragging
To the Post Modern Consumer, nothing is more nauseous than the sound of someone singing their own virtues. If you must convey subjective information about your product, then do so through the voice of your customers, peers, or reviewers.

In our sample copy we deleted the following modifiers: finest, consistently, keen, strong, superior, smoothly, less invasive, cost-effective. Anyone of these colorful words could be acceptable, bracketed within the quotes of an unbiased third party, but they will not work when we declare them for ourselves.

4. Substitute general descriptions with specific facts
The Post Modern Consumer demands to be respected as a capable decision maker. They despise thinly veiled sales pressure, but they appreciate simple, direct communication. Give them the resources they need to make an intelligent comparison; then politely "step back" and allow them to make their own evaluation.

5. Admit your Weaknesses
The Post Modern Consumer is not looking for perfection. He is looking for honesty. He wants to build a relationship with someone or with some company that he can trust.

Keep in mind that Transparent Marketing is about values. It asks that we treat the customer with the same integrity that we would expect to be treated.

What do you think about Transparent Marketing? Do you think you’ll be able to implement this strategy at your dealership and on your website?

Car Dealers! Have you heard of the term, “Showrooming?” It’s basically a customer that comes into your dealership to look at vehicles while looking online on their smartphone at your competitor’s pricing. Annoying, right? So how do you combat these “show-roomers?”

One thing you can do is create a loyalty program. For loyalty programs to have the desired effect, you must consider these anti-showrooming strategies:

1. Your prices have to be in the same ballpark as those of your competitors.
2. Customers make every purchasing decision independently. You can't expect them to take long-term loyalty rewards into account as part of the buying decision unless those customers are explicitly prompted to do so.
3. Buying decisions often take place in a matter of seconds, which means that any anti-showrooming strategy needs to be executed in near real time to have any effect.

According to Marketingprofs.com  there are five tactics that are worth exploring when showrooming is a problem:

1. Closing the price gap. When customers in a loyalty program receive discounts, the distance between the in-store price and the competitor's online price diminishes. Dealers must find a way to communicate the "effective price" (the current price minus the points-based discount) quickly and clearly: for example, "With your Valued Customer discount, the effective price of this [item]  is $14,999!" Customers can't be expected to do the math themselves.
2. Bonus points. When showrooming is a problem with specific items, retailers can offer increased discounts or points on those items to further mitigate the price difference.
3. Free accessories. Dealers can offer free items that complement the purchase, such as a a bobble head for the car or some cool sunglasses to wear with the customer’s new ride. Often, such items have a perceived value that's significantly higher than their actual dollar value.
4. Bounceback offers. If a customer's behavior indicates the potential for a lost sale, dealers can transmit a bounceback offer, either with a discount or some other incentive. To be effective, however, the bounceback needs to happen in near real-time and it must relate very specifically to the customer's interests (Ex. free window tinting with vehicle purchase).
5. Pushed coupons. With today's technology, retailers can offer instant discounts and special cross-sell or up-sell opportunities; they can even reward customers simply for entering the store. The value of so-called push technology is that it gives customers a reason to make an in-store purchase. For example, ActivEngage, thanks to an integration with Hooklogic, offers ActivShow, which brings customers into your showroom by offering great incentives like a $25 prepaid MasterCard or $25 incentives to popular stores like Starbucks® or Target®.

What do you think of these tactics? Do you have any strategies in combating showrooming?

Here I was sitting in a landing page optimization course and the first thing they did was throw a formula at me. C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a.Thankfully, it really wasn’t a mathematical formula, just a conversion sequence that helped you visualize conversion. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin the founder of MECLABS, the world's largest independent research institution focused on offer response optimization, was standing in front of the class saying, “You don’t optimize websites; you optimize thought sequences. Say it with me, C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a.”

What goes in that landing page optimization formula you say?

• Motivation of user, force of the value proposition, incentive, friction, and anxiety.

He went on to say that the sales funnel we all know and love is actually upside down, “The value proposition is the fundamental force powering your prospects up the sales funnel,” he added.

This can be measured by four essential elements of offer:

• Appeal- how much do I desire this offer?
• Exclusivity- where else can I get this offer?
• Credibility- can I trust your claims?
• Clarity-what are you actually offering?

In order to express your value proposition on the Web, you must have congruence (having every element of your page state or support your proposition) and continuity (making sure that every step of the buying process states or supports the proposition).

I know I can’t say it as best as Dr. McGlaughlin can, so I found a video where he discusses the value proposition in better detail.

Got it? Good. Next was incentives. The object of incentives is to balance emotional forces from negative to positive. To determine your ideal incentive you must consider: marketing intuition, perceived value differential,and return on incentive. Here is another video in which Dr. McGlaughlin discusses these elements

Next Dr. McGlaughlin spoke about friction and anxiety. Friction, in marketing, is the psychological resistance to a given element in the sales process. Anxiety, in other words, is like concern, but it is just as lethal as friction. To get a better idea of these two elements, click here.

What does this mean for you?
If your Website isn’t optimized properly, you're losing customers. Dr.McGlaughlin showed us case studies where there was a 200% increase in capturing lead information by simply adjusting elements of their website. Take a look at the links presented above to better optimize your website, you won't regret it. 

 With this information presented to me I had to take a 50 question test to get certified in landing page optimization. I passed, would you?

 ActivEngage, the most trusted name in live chat brings the top ten blogs and auto news stories right to you! We monitor industry trends, current events and the auto dealer community every week to bring you the top ten blogs and automotive stories from around the globe. In this weekly edition – portraits made out of beef jerky, alternate endings to the Dark Knight, and ActivEngage makes the Inc. 500!

10.  Content Is King: 10 Ways To Drive Traffic And Get People Talking About Your Dealership

This post by David Johnson explains how the Panda algorithm change ranks websites from low to high quality. He also outlines what you can do to make your content high quality.

9. Commander of Beef: Jerky Portraits of Obama and Romney

Ever wondered how the President and Presidential candidate would look like if they were made of beef jerky? The answers to all your prayers is finally here.

8. The Winning Dimension
Keith Shetterly states in his blog, “Every successful business wins because it has at least these dimensions:  The Paper, The Plan—and The People.” Read more to find out his perspective on this matter.

7. Being a Gentleman
Check out this funny clip. Chivalry always wins?

6. How Social Media Cuts Both Ways

Social media seems like such a pleasant, magical journey for a business to embark on. Ask a mundane question on Facebook, tweet a photo of your lunch, and the world will love you (and ultimately buy whatever you're selling).

5. How the Dark Knight Should have Ended
Were you satisfied with the ending of the Dark Knight Rises? If not, here are some alternative endings just for fun.

4. Facebook Releases New App for faster iOS. 
Facebook issued a massive update to its iOS app Thursday, with app version 5.0 and describes the app as being “rebuilt so it’s faster and easier to use.”
Once a template for how to design a great mobile app, Facebook for iOS has faced criticisms in the past 18 months for being slow and unresponsive.

3. The Business of Fake Followers
After reading many blogs about the topic of fake Twitter followers, I decided to do some investigating on it for myself. I found that the business of buying and selling fake Twitter followers is booming, according to a study by Barracuda Labs.

2. Lance Armstrong drops his fight against doping charges
He’s battled everything else, from cancer to the government, which raises questions on his innocence. If there was a battle to be fought, he would have fought it till the end.

1. ActivEngage makes #121 on the Inc. 500 list

Live Chat Provider ActivEngage, Inc. Ranks No. 121 on the 2012 Inc. 500 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 2,626.9%. Find out which companies also made the list and which didn’t!

Did we miss anything important? Like our top ten blogs this week? Leave us a comment below! Or if you really can’t wait for your automotive fix, follow @activengage on Twitter for daily updates on auto industry news

Original blog posted can be found here

After reading many blogs about the topic of fake followers, I decided to do some investigating on the topic for myself. I found that the business of buying and selling fake Twitter followers is booming, according to a study by Barracuda Labs: Among the top 100 Google search results for the term "buy Twitter followers" are roughly 58 websites and 20 eBay sellers that offer various bundles of fake followers for sale. The average cost of 1,000 fake Twitter followers is just $18.

The study began in May 2012 when Barracuda Labs set up three Twitter accounts and purchased between 20,000-70,000 followers for each account on eBay and Google. After analyzing these followers’ profiles and tweets this is what Barracuda Found:

Dealers (those users who create fake accounts and sell followings):

• There are 20 eBay sellers and 58 websites (within top 100 returns of searching “buy twitter followers” in Google) where people can buy (fake) followers

• Twitter username is used to purchase, no authentication is required

• The average price of buying 1000 followers is $18

• A Dealer can control as many as ~150,000 or more Twitter followers (contact@kashifrox)

• A Dealer can earn as much as $800/day for 7 weeks of selling followings if they can control  20,000 fake accounts (estimated on several random fake accounts reaching 2000 followings in 7 weeks and assume each following involved a minimum $20 purchase)

• In addition to selling followings from these fake accounts, there are numerous opportunities for expansion into other services: selling tweets/re-tweets to earn additional profits

Abusers are defined as those users who buy followers (most of which are fake) in order to look more popular or to use the accounts for selling ads:

• Roughly 11,283 Abusers were identified, each with an average following of 48,885.
• 53% of Abusers have 4,000-26,000 followers.
• 75% of Abusers display a URL in their profile, compared with 31% of Twitter users overall.

Fake Accounts are those created by dealers for selling followings or tweeting. In total, Barracuda found 72,212 unique fake accounts; among them:

• 61% were less than three months old (as of April 16, 2012).
• 55% had roughly 2,000 followers.

Barracuda also reviewed the 17% spike in a presidential candidate's Twitter following. You can read more about it here (its towards the bottom of the study).


What do you think of this study?

Writing content for your website? Use the inverted pyramid style. Why? Your customers want information in an instant. They don’t want to read through copy to find what your keypoint is. Whatever your essential message is, put it first. Most Web users skim through content in an “F” pattern.  They look more at the beginning of the lines than all the way across and as the copy gets longer, their interest goes down.

In school, we were all taught to write in the narrative style with the main point as the conclusion. Unfortunately, this style isn’t effective for Web content.  Instead, write in the inverted pyramid style where the main point is at the beginning of the copy. “The inverted pyramid organizes stories not around ideas or chronologies but around facts,” says journalism historian Mitchell Stephens in “A History of News.” ”It weighs and shuffles the various pieces of information, focusing with remarkable single-mindedness on their relative news value.”

Although writing this way might be challenging, writing in this style is a very useful skill as it forces you to organize and sum up the point of the copy in a single paragraph.  By using this inverted pyramid style, your website will be easier to read and keep your visitors on your webpage for longer periods of time.

Just for Fun: Facts of the Inverted Pyramid
Origin: The inverted pyramid structure is the product of an old media technology—the telegraph. When news outlets would telegraph information over the wires, it made sense to use the inverted pyramid because the most vital information in the story was transmitted first. In the event of a lost connection, whoever received the story could still print the essential facts.

If not for this style of writing this is how our news would read like:
British correspondent William Howard Russell in his coverage of the Battle of Balaklava in 1854:

If the exhibition of the most brilliant valor, of the excess of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected luster on the best days of chivalry can afford full consolation for the disaster of today, we can have no reason to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and barbarian enemy.

Did you enjoy reading that paragraph? Didn’t think so and neither will your website visitors.