I think pre-internet, most people trusted big companies more than little ones because they were bigger. If you have never heard of a company then how can you trust it? Now that any company is findable online the tables have turned. Big companies that have static brochure websites, where they have their corporate jargon and stock photos on every page leads one to think, what are they hiding? Meanwhile little companies whose websites consist of blog posts and insights into who is behind the company and what they think leads one to believe, these people are just cool normal people who do what they do well. Cool.

I want By Data Be Driven to be my personal Internet marketing consulting brand but I choose to make my site a blog that shows who I really am. I think that goes father than a lot of pages about services offered and my unique strategies of how to “effectively market your brand online using integrated search marketing to help companies get noticed, retain customers and continue growing.” If you really want to know what I can do you’ll find out from someone else other than me, so why put up the front and just be as personal as I can?

I think before long, most sites will have a blog, feeds from their interaction with others and interactive widgets/applications on their home page instead of a stock photo of a happy customer, their tag line and links to about us, services and contact. Just wait.

I finished reading the book Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres. I thought it was good. I liked his explanation of randomized a/b or multi variant testing done online and off.

He explains that randomly dividing prospects into two groups and seeing which approach has the highest rate is one of the most powerful super crunching techniques ever devised.

When you rely on historical data, it is much harder to tease out causation. The sample size is key. If we get a large enough sample, we can be pretty sure that the group coming up heads will be statistically identical to the group coming up tails. If we then intervene to treat the heads differently, we can measure the pure effect of the intervention…after randomization makes the two groups identical on every other dimension, we can be confident that any change in the two groups outcome was caused by their different treatment.

Of course, randomization doesn’t mean that those who were treated differently are exactly the same as those who were not treated differently. If we looked at the heights of people in one group, we would see a bell curve of heights.  The point is that we would see the same bell curve of heights for those for those in the other group. Since the distribution of both groups becomes increasingly identical as the sample size increases, then we can attribute any differences in the average group response to the difference in treatment.

In lab experiments, researches create data by carefully controlling for everything to create matched pairs that are identical except for the thing being tested. Outside of the lab, it’s sometimes simply impossible to create pairs that are the same on all peripheral dimensions. Randomization is how businesses can create data without creating perfectly matched distributions.

The power behind randomized testing is undeniable. So should we just have computers make all our decisions for us? With that question in mind is were he goes throughout the majority of the book.

Randomized trials require firms to hypothesize in advance before the test starts. Historical data lets the researcher sit back and decide what to test after the fact. Randomizers need to take more initiative than people who run after the fact regressions.

The most important thing that is left to humans is to use our minds and our intuition to guess at what veriables should and should not be included in the statistical analyisis. The regressions can test whether there is a casual effect and estimate the size of the causal impact, but somebody (some body, some human) needs to specify the test itself.

So then the question becomes what do we test, and after we test the question becomes, what are the results telling us?

I finished reading the book World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott. I thought it was OK. I’ll explain the problem with these kinds of books at the end.

While I was reading it I came to the conclusion that success at social media marketing and having your business idea spread virally comes down to two main factors: creativity and understanding the tools that the internet provides. You may have a good understanding of how to use all the internet tools: blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo, ebooks, monitoring your brand using Tweet Scan, Google Alerts, Boardtracker, Social Mention, trying to build competitions, interactive tools, applications, widgets; but if you don’t have something creative that’s worth spreading it won’t spread. The creative content part is harder than the tools part.

One way to start getting creative is to put your message in terms of the need that your business solves. Scott says:

By truly understanding the market problems that your products and services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, egocentric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization.

Once you’ve gotten down to the needs that your product fulfills, then you can start trying to come up with creative ideas around communicating your solution to that need. After that there is not much advice one can give on how to be creative. I guess you could try brainstorming ideas. Another good idea in the book is to try lots of things in hopes that at least one of them sticks.

Many attempts will be duds that won’t spark any interest; a few will generate some notice and basically pay back your investment of the time required to make them; and a handful will spread to thousands or even millions of people and make the entire program of 10 or 20 initiatives worthwhile.

Realistically I think you’re more likely to make a hit if you try 50 to 100 initiatives.

So there’s the problem with most of these internet marketing books; they can’t explain to you how to creatively use the tools that the internet provides to spread your message. They can only show you the successful ideas other people have had. That’s the hardest part and only you can figure it out.

I read Jeff Jarvis’s article in Businessweek about openess and the internet.

Comcast has learned that there is a public discussion about its service happening independently and that is why it assigned staff to monitor and respond to Twitterers’ complaints. Every company alive is hiring search engine optimization experts to help them manage their public face for Google and its users. What more powerful business elixir is there today than Googlejuice?

And then I saw this post from techcrunch about a story of a 104 year old twitter user.

What none of those original stories told you, was that poor old Ivy had not joined Twitter just because it was suddenly the talk of the senior citizens home. No. She joined because home PC maintenance company Geek Squad signed her up, propped her up for a photo opportunity – even using her own account to Twitpic the event – and press-released the hell out of it. And the media fell for it.

The one thing worse than not being transparent is being caught not being transparent.

With millions of blogs and websites, what can your business do to stand out? In my opinion the best strategy for local businesses in Denver to succeed in search engine rankings is to provide hyper local content.

First, some stats: According to SBI + M:

• 54% of Americans have substituted the Internet and local search for phone books (comScore networks).
• 66% of Americans use online local search, like Google local search, to locate local businesses (TMP/comScore/SBI + M).
• 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call or purchase (TMP/comScore).

Now can you see why local search is so important? Here are are few ideas of how to make you business stand out in Denver:

1. First take John Jantsch’s local content post to heart:

Make sure that you use the names of cities and suburbs on your pages, add your address to Google maps, talk about local and community events in your blog posts and titles. Link out to local sites using town and neighborhood names in the anchor text. As wells as using local words in you title tags of pages, anchor text for internal and external links, H1 tags, bold and italics tags, urls of page names, and alt and title description of images.

• Use outside.in to comment and post about news in your area. They help you find places around you, get news for the places and neighborhoods you really care about, and engage more with your neighbors.
• Use getlisted.org to get started registering your business to local directories.

2. Get descriptive. For example, according to Google’s Keyword Tool, keywords “Denver Restaurants” get about 135,000 searches a month and “Thornton Restaurants” gets only 2,400. Sure, it would be nice to be ranked well for the 135 thousand searches for Denver restaurants, but also consider that there are 10,900,000 competing pages for those keywords. The chances of being ranked well for those words are slim. Meanwhile, Thornton restaurants has only 1,090,000 competing pages; that’s 9,810,000 less pages of competition.

And think of the mindset of someone searching for restaurants in Denver vs. restaurants in Thornton. The Thornton searcher is much more likely to be looking for a place to eat near them right now then someone broadly searching for restaurants in Denver where they may be doing research for later or any other host of things.

3. There is this idea of Needle in a Haystack Marketing where you can publish very specific ideas to the Internet and, thanks to the long tail and search engines, people looking for specific things can find what they are looking for thanks to you. Your message doesn’t reach everyone but that’s OK because the people you do reach are the ones looking for you. If you have a specific product or service unique to what you do in Denver, then use it in your content.

This should get you started. For more ideas see SEOBook’s web publishing strategies.

In it’s most basic terms, marketing is the act of trying to get people to care about your business. Get them to care enough and they just might buy. The problem is finding enough people to care when no one cares. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody:

Having a handful of people highly motivated and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn’t care more, and the general population wondered why these obsessed people didn’t just shut up.

This is because:

The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something. Many people care a little about causes and events, but not many care enough to do anything about it on their own,  both because that kind of effort is hard and because individual actions have so little effect on big corporations.

But that’s now OK because:

Social media lowers the hurdles to doing something in the first place, so that people who cared a little could participate a little, while being effective in aggregate.

This is important in marketing your business on the internet because:

Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activities themselves.

Get those less than loyal customers to engage with you, even if it is a little bit. Social media marketing allows your little brand to have a chance. Every extra person is another drop in the bucket that helps your idea to spread.

The ability of increasing a customer’s connectivity to your business before and after they buy is a huge advantage of online marketing. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains the importance of a community in facilitating that connectivity:

If you want to create a change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced, and expressed and nurtured.

He explains how John Wesley spread Methodism by traveling around England and North America organizing small groups. Rebecca Wells book, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, went through 48 printings and 2.5 million copies because of book groups who flocked to it.

It’s easier to remember and appreciate something if you discuss it for hours with your best friends. It becomes a social experience, an object of conversation.

So now how is a community created? First start small:

Small close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic’s potential of a message or idea. That’s the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure…And what gets measured gets done.” Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard

This quote entails the essence of data driven Internet marketing. Do you know where your customers come from, how much the average customer spends or how often your customers come back? Powerful decisions can be made from looking at the answers to these few questions alone. You could target your marketing efforts to the places where most of your customers come from. You could try up-selling techniques to improve your average profit per sale. You could give your most loyal customers tools to spread your message via word of mouth to their friends.

Wal-Mart keeps track of the number of items per hour each of its checkout clerks scans at every cash register, at every store, for every shift as a means of measuring their productivity. These obsessive data gathering habits are at the heart of Wal-Mart’s strategy. A small business cannot afford to ignore the importance of marketing accountability and measuring success.

Internet marketing allows you to get your business in front of the people most likely to buy. Weather its through improving SEO when people search for your service or product or PPC though Google’s content network, it works better than the traditional CPM strategy.

The vehicle with the lowest CPM, cost per thousand, is thought to be the best because it reaches the greatest number of people for the money. But this confuses activity with results. What does it matter how much you throw if none of it sticks? It’s not enough to place ads or have them seen be lots of people. What happens as a result? Did anyone buy the advertised product?

There are two metrics in advertising: reach and frequency. Reach is how many people see your ad and frequency is how many times it is seen. No single ad, no matter how well produced, is ever enough to sell you product. You need frequency to earn trust and you need trust to sell. With larger reach, the percentage of ideal customers that are interested in your product will be very small. A lot of money is wasted on people who are not in the market for your product.

As Seth Godin Puts it:

The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people.

Christ Anderson explains the importance of targeting:

Sure, the traffic today is still mostly going to Facebook and MySpace. But as they struggle to target ads based on the faint signals of consumer behavior in a generic social network, the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy.

Thanks to the internet, the barriers to entry have fallen. We are in a publish first and then sort-out-the-good-stuff-later environment. The gate keepers, who once had control of limited shelf space and limited TV stations, used that scarcity to their advantage by having a say in what made it through to the masses.

Now bloggers are the new gatekeepers. Instead of saying what should and shouldn’t be published, they create buzz and spread the word about what has been published. Most bloggers aren’t paid for what they do so a mediocre press release will not get their attention. The main asset that bloggers have is their audience and they will appeal to them fist and foremost. Any blogger that disregards their audience for the sake of making some cash to plug a product will loose their credibility with their audience.

First identify the blogs that actually do have an interest in what you’re trying to have featured. Use technorati. Read their blogs and interact with them. Post comments, submit useful articles that don’t necessarily have to do with your business and build a relationship. Then in time, with something relevant about your business, submit it with a personal note and it will be read.