Author: Atlantic BT

My trusty lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta and I will be blogging live tomorrow from the http://www.internetsummit.com/ on these very crisp pages.  I haven’t brought out my lawyer to a conference in quite some time.  He promised to monitor my tweets as well.

Check out @darylhemeon #ISum11 as well as I will be using my newfangled Google machine to do some tweeting as well.

Wish me luck as I chase down the new American Dream.

Braced and ready you watch your average visits decrease. Life is scary and exciting in a unique Internet marketing way, a very fast way. Average visits the number of visits before traffic to your ecommerce site converts (does what you want them to do), count down. In the summer your e-commerce web site might have an average of 4 or even 6 visits before conversion. Thanks to the most magical deadline, December 25 (December 20th online due to shipping); conversions are coming every 2 visits now. Soon you site will convert every 1.5 visits. At this time of year LLBean.com is starting to sell a million dollars of merchandise in an hour. Amazon’s hundred million dollars days are around the corner. Ecommerce is crazy, cool and happening NOW.

Black Friday Online Ecommerce
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is about hype in the brick and mortar store world. How many people slept in Target’s parking lot? Who is going to get this year’s Elmo? The economy may be down, but Black Friday madness will never die. Black Friday shopping madness isn’t about economy or presents for the holidays. Black Friday is dinosaur brain, Darwinian survival of the fittest stuff, the kind of ancient genetic stuff that doesn’t go away.

We are humans. We shop therefor we are, and we shop on Black Friday in to tell ancient Hunter / Gather stories. Our Black Friday shopping stories highlight challenge, obstacles, creativity and triumph. “I’m alive,” these survival stories say, “I WON” Black Friday shoppers declare.

Here are five tips to increase your Black Friday sales (though if you are reading this and your email campaigns, site and product pages aren’t tuned nothing is likely to save you):

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 1: WOOT-ize Your Ecommerce Site
Woot sells one thing daily. They start at midnight and go until they don’t have anymore (typically around noon, this time of year by much earlier depending on what is being sold and how good the discount). Woot knows the old direct mail adage – best deals, best time of year. They don’t kid around during the holidays.

On Black Friday your ecommerce site needs to create competition and a sense of scarcity. Scarcity, real or manufactured, heightens competition. Your ecommerce site has an advantage over Woot.com. You sell more than one thing. Selling more than one thing means your average cart may include lost leaders and very profitable products. Lost leaders are products sold below costs to create buzz and help sell everything else. Manage to profitable averages online remembering a little piece of a large number is a large number. Network dynamics favor the brave.

What is your most popular product? What is your cost? Cut your cost in half and sell your most popular product for one day only, in limited supply on a clearly stated FIRST COME FIRST GETS DEAL, at some amazing price. Be open and honest about what you’re up to. You are making headlines, you are breaking records, and you are going a little crazy for one day and only for a few hours. Starting shouting this idea NOW in teasers like, “Are we crazy? Meet here Black Friday (11.25) and you tell us.”

You can afford to be more fearless on 11.25 than you think. Every Free Shipping trigger we ever set was exceeded by at least 30%. If we set a buy $50 get free shipping trigger this time of year we bested by $50. Free shipping is the cost of poker. No one talks about “winning free shipping”, but without it you don’t get to have the other conversation – the, “OMG I got such a great deal on Black Friday at Martins.com, I got X for –Y”.

Black Friday was the day brick and mortar retailers traditionally moved from red ink to black (losing to making money), but ecommerce is different. Online LOSE as much money as you can on Black Friday. I say this comfortable knowing you WON’T LOSE MONEY if you play the game even half right because the PR and cart profitable combinations will make more money than playing it safe. Win Black Friday, win the season, win the season and win the year is how Internet marketers think, that simple and very complex progression defines all content network marketing.

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 2: Social
The days when your team could take Friday off to shop with the family are gone. Your team must monitor your offer’s social reception now. Watch Search.Twitter.com, Topsy and Google Alerts. If you have the money hire a real time web watcher like Radian6, watch Facebook and your emails like hawks on wires watching a field for dinner (a favorite analogy).

If you have an ecommerce site you must be engaged in the conversations on Black Friday. Digest turkey, respond to Tweets, post great comments on your Facebook page and push what is happening NOW out to your site (as much as possible using feeds or snippets) to increase buzz, competition and sales. Almost out of that GREAT DEAL? Good since you are losing your shirt, but Tweet it, post it to Facebook and email it. Create an infinite number of second prizes. Say, “Missed the most crazy deal ever, but you are in luck because….”

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 3: Lions, Tigers and Bears…Oh My
I HATE count downs, blinking anything and SCREAMING headlines 363 days a year. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday design is not even in the car. Designers please cover your ears. Use any blinking anything that gets and convert attention so you can wrap and pack a record breaking ecommerce sales season.

By-the-way, if you didn’t test blinking objects, motion, video, large Call-To-Actions and RED in your buttons before 11.25 DON’T TEST THEM NOW. You can’t afford to try untried things now. If you know RED BUTTONS work then make the red button on 11.25 25% bigger than normal (50% if you are brave and are making a CRAZY offer).

Black Friday is NOT a day to try new things.

“What about our brand,” I can hear the Tiffany brand manager saying. Seriously? Are you kidding? If your brand can’t stand a day of a little junky conversion then you are already junky and probably don’t convert. Tiffany can afford to be a tad less snotty on 11.25 if it means a 10% sales jump or probably something north of $10 million. I can be a LOT LESS snotty for $10m what aboutyou?  No matter what I tell you to do you will naturally self-select down so GO NASTY SHOUTING LARGE ON 11.25 and keep what works for Cyber Monday.

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 3: The Three C’s
Ecommerce success depends on content, community and campaigns.

Black Friday seems to be all about campaigns and ecommerce conversion. Not the case. Community and Content are MORE important on Black Friday. Your campaigns are in the ground now, unchangeable, away from the dock. Social is the only way to change your ecommerce site’s needle now, so BE SOCIAL. If you haven’t built the right landing pages, told the right stories and made your offers special either by association or actual fact then Black Friday will be just another average retail day for your site.

The most important ecommerce idea is – THE RICH GET RICHER. Network marketing, and networks themselves, are set to heap a disproportionate reward on the few. What Venture Capitalist like to call an online “territory grab” is just a structure of what Notre Dame network researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls a “Scale Free” network in his book Linked:How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else.

Networks create hubs (the rich). Hubs get more traffic and links than any other nodes (web sites or clusters of sites). If your site is hub congratulation. I bet most reading this post aren’t Facebook, Twitter, Etsy.com or Amazon. If you aren’t one of these lucky few you must pay attention to Content, Community and Campaigns as if your online ecommerce life depends on them (because it does).

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 4: Please No Testing on 11.25, Except….
May seem crazy to even THINK of testing on 11.25. Trust me, this statement is needed. Because you can test something doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do, a point often lost on my ecommerce brothers and sisters who get caught in an infinite testing loop. Q: What you should test on 11.25? A: NOTHING.

Play with the A team and test nothing on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. I write this knowing friends will call with reasons why tests they are dong are backend enough no one will see them anyway. Nope, that argument doesn’t hold because test, any test, is conditional and this is NOT the time of year to be conditional. Black Friday as a testing environment is so specialized what are you really learning anyway? Is next year’s Black Friday doing to be exactly like this one? Is Black Friday remotely like any other day?

One exception is testing offers for Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, can be as big as or bigger in online sales than Black Friday. Cyber Monday was created when work T1 high speed lines were more reliable than home dial up. Cyber Monday hangs around because we deal into it and who wants to be back at work on the Monday after Thanksgiving?

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 5: Overload your Tech The Week Before
The week before Thanksgiving is slower than every day after. Use the week before to test your DNS server, your load balancer and a five other technical things I don’t understand. Get your Rich Kurnik’s (a friend who I would trust with my networked life) to create artificial demand, monitor response time and dress rehearse as much ecommerce as you can.

Every slow second at this time of year costs thousands or millions, so don’t be slow. Have more than enough technical horse power. Have horses sitting there waiting to run. Horsepower costs are going down as I write this. If you don’t or can’t get inside your technology “stack” find someone you trust to test everything as close to Black Friday and Cyber Monday as possible.

Last Black Friday Ecommerce Tip
Final Black Friday ecomerce tip is hang on, listen, respond and have fun.

You will look back on this year’s battle as the “good old days” no matter what happens on Black Friday in 2011 ecommerce sales. I used to give my team Friday off. Thanks to social those days are gone. Soon Thanksgiving will be a work day for ecommerce teams (if it isn’t already).

Q: Will the pace of ecommerce be slower or faster next year? “It can’t get faster,” you think and you are wrong, way off, not even close. Black Friday ecommerce is going to get much, much faster. Hope these tips help you make more money this Black Friday (or next).

Martin

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Martin Smith
Marketing Director
Atlantic BT
Martin(dot)Smith(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com

How do you explain a sand castle? The SEO fighter pilot from Miami used the absurdest question to answer our Chief Financial Officier’s question. Our CFO asked, “what do you fear?” We, the multi-channel retailer I worked for at the time, were in an unfamiliar cockpit. We’d just been taken for an amazing ride, a ride into a land of SEO arbitrage never experienced and only marginally understood now after lunch and a two hour meeting.

The three guys from Miami tried, tried hard, to explain how they viewed the world. Everything in their world was arbitrage. Make something for pennies sell it for dollars. Make something for nickels sell it for dollars. Make something for dimes sell it for dollars. Everything was arbitrage. I wasn’t sure the furniture in their offices weren’t on loan and capable of being bought by the highest bidder on some auction site.

How prescient a meeting was that? Internet marketing and search engine optimization looks more like pork bellies futures daily. Jeff Bezos, a former Wallstreeter, seems to have made the entire world after the street’s desire to buy and sell. David Meerman Scott in his book Real Time Marketing and PR declares our trading futures, a future that is happening now as today’s meeting with Radian6 and last week’s meeting with Argyle Social confirm.

Q: Do you think things are going to move faster or slower in the future?

Thinking like an Internet marketer on SEO means understanding Key Performance Indicators, being able to feel a trend and riff content almost before the feeling is over and arbitrage, arbitrage and arbitrage. Think like an Internet marketer means the next time your CFO asks about social, mobile or QR Code ROI ask if they can explain a sand castle (lol). Make sure your resume is up-to-date and remember Atlantic BT is hiring so be fearless :).

Think Like An Internet Marketer: What Would Steve Do?

Watch our Prezi / Video

Want to think like an Internet marketer? Let’s start with a story. Recently over lunches, phone calls, webinars and emails an important idea surfaced. Were Facebook LIKES becoming the new “link love”? Friends who run startups, large ecommerce sites and other Internet marketers I trust were seeing something in their web analytics, something new. Are Facebook LIKES the new link love?

The Facebook “LIKE” button was mentioned by Byron White, CEO of IdeaLuanch, Phil Buckley Interactive Media Director at Capstrat and entrepreneur and CEO of PointShops Eric Garrison. One friend mentioning “Likes are the new link love” has me reaching for a thinking cap, two friends saying  something similar creates a search for articles and links. Three smart friends = a new Internet marketing truth.

But we didn’t have confirming data, or nothing my friends would share :).

Hope you are as blessed with smart, smart friends since life is so much easier. My friends pay for their lives knowing statements such as “Likes are the new link love” mean our Internet marketing world is changing again. We lucky few Internet marketers must change or lose traction. Traction is life online. Traction is NEVER neutral. You always gain or lose traction.

Search Engine Optimization is the giant scorecard in the sky. The most immediate interim step, the thing before you earn money, is creating an ever expanding Google presence and why platforms beat web sites. Platforms, sites capable of putting up hundreds of thousands of pages (Amazon is on their way to a billion), win Google’s content marketing network race.

Google is always only an addictive environment. Take things away and pain ensues. Take away too much from Google all at one time and MONSTER pain ensues (been there, done that, burned the t-shirt and NEVER want to do it again). Since almost every Atlantic BT customer HAS a web site these days, our jobs are changing again. Back in the day we preached  search engine optimization (SEO), content network marketing and social media marketing.

We carried, new and so suspect Internet marketing messages to a mistrusting, skeptical mob. We rode a noisy old roller coaster clattering its way up a towering railed mountain hoping wheels held and no one moved suddenly. Reaching the top we threw our hands up in sheer joy as Newton’s roller coaster laws came into full force. In search of consistent absolutes we never find (or never find fast enough),”Facebook LIKES are the new link love,” sounds good.

We wait and wait for data. Reviewing NorthFace, Patagonia and Oakley for a prospective customer we found the data, the sword in the stone. Each major adventure sportswear brand finds a way to win with Internet marketing. How they win reinforces their branding. Web marketing is an accurate reflection of who you, your product, brand and company are. Here is how three different and competitive brands found blue oceans in the adventure sportswear online RED OCEAN:

• NorthFace rules Facebook with 1.4 million likes producing a magical PageRank of 7
• Patagonia has the most pages in Google, a great blog and link love also PR7
• Oakley’s page count is way down, but they are Twitter scrappy with a PR6

Each company creates a unique strategy. They find ways to win traffic and Google “Authority”. Each understands internal strengths and weaknesses. They know how to play poker with competitors avoiding strengths in favor of exploiting weaknesses. There MUST be weaknesses creating blue oceans somewhere.

Every Internet marketer trades off gross # of site pages for winning on Twitter (Oakley), Facebook likes for blog posts (NorthFace) and Blog posts for Facebook Likes (Patagonia). Each brand’s character is visible in their Internet marketing choices. NorthFace is adventure, Patagonia community and Oakley adrenaline buzz.

Maybe your site sells high end audio like Moon Audio, is the leading construction M&A firm in the country such as FMI or your Informer application connects disparate databases for easy web reporting such as Entrinsik. Your business segment doesn’t matter. Somewhere there is a blue ocean. There is a blue ocean in every business, a piece of ocean not yet red with carnage. Watch the Prezi below to see how Oakley found Twitter, NorthFace cornered Facebook and Patagonia knitted strength from a  campaigns (1% for the Planet), blogs, social media and site strength (Patagonia had the largest number of pages in Google).

Are Facebook LIKES the new link love? YES, unquestionably.

On Monday, if your site doesn’t have Facebook’s LIKE button LARGE and IN CHARGE, think, “What would Steve do?” And, plaster the thumbs up all over your site in clear and present danger, make your customers trip over it, campaign on it (free something when you LIKE us on Facebook) and you will be doing what Steve would have done. You will be thinking like an Internet marketer.

Not convinced?

Watch this Prezi and then plan to walk over to your IT department, beg, plead and cajole to get Facebook LIKES all over your website as soon as possible.

Think Like An Internet Marketer Prezi – Watch the VIDEO NOW.

Ever meet someone and instantly like and respect them?

Meeting entrepreneur Leo Croes today was one of those moments. After a seven year turn in the Marines Leo worked for Pfizer until long road trips and too much time away from home helped him get in touch with life’s larger question – why am I doing this? Leo’s answer was to start Triangle Carpet Specialists and work hard, very hard. I know, after speaking with Leo for an hour, he works hard. He’s been working since he was thirteen. I was watching Leave It To Beaver when I was 13 how about you? I admire anyone who sacrificed so I can be an American.

Leo trained Marines. Think about that, the special man helping put down your new floor or clean carpets in your home (they are coming to clean mine at my house in Durham next week) TRAINED MARINES. How cool is that? You must be LARGE and IN CHARGE to be a Marine. Q: How large do you have to be to TRAIN Marines? A: LARGE AND IN CHARGE :). Leo is patient, listens intently, sets realistic goals and is a great Atlantic BT customer. If you were trapped in a foxhole in some strange place surrounded by people with hostile intent, you want Leo there.

My carpet isn’t a foxhole but it is full of “hostile intent” (lol). I didn’t know cleaning my carpets twice a year is a must to maintain carpet fibers and keep allergens at bay. Every morning I take medicine from Leo’s old company, Pfizer, to breathe. Breathing is something you get used too, something you immediately want whenever you can’t. Today Leo taught me how to think of carpets as highly influential investments. Investments in health (duh I’m a cancer survivor thanks to some amazing DUKE medical Marines) and my house’s value (should there ever be any again).

Having a Marine who trained Marines clean my carpets twice a year seems like a great idea and cheap against the cost of NOT doing so. I’m guilty of not cleaning my carpets 2x a year but am pleading ignorance. Paying Leo to help me stay out of Duke (no offense to my friends there) seems a good investment. I will sign a service contract with Leo and Triangle Carpet Specialists next week so I have one less pain in the butt thing to worry about every year.

Leo’s carpet cleaning and flooring business for homes and businesses is growing despite a lousy housing market and our “no one has any money” times. Leo knows something Atlantic BT understands. Leo bets his company, years of hard work and his beautiful children’s futures (daughter just graduated from Peace College with a business and Spanish degree and now works for dad in the office, son is headed to NC State) on quality, care, innovation and hard work. Leo’s children love their dad and the business they’ve built. Oh, let’s not forget Leo’s amazing wife. Guess what she does for a living? If you guessed nurse you are starting to get Leo and his very special family. I just spoke with his daughter Nina on the phone moments after filling out Triangle Carpet Specialists “Contact Us” form. Telling Nina how much I like her dad she laughed and admitted to liking him a little too.

I’ve locked and loaded my carpet and flooring needs for life because I’ve had bad, bad experiences with national companies who franchise this area. Finding someone who LOVES cleaning carpets and laying new floors isn’t easy. Cleaning carpets is hard, hard work (especially in my house were walking upstairs is climbing Everest). I would trust Leo with my house and car keys and know he and anyone he hires to help will take care, show respect and protect me like a friend (even though we’ve just met). Some people are just like that and you know them when you meet them.

Leo has a goal to triple his business and our amazing Brian, the Atlantic BT marketing team, our great programmers, graphic and UX designers, my boss Mark Foulkrod and our owner Jon Jordan will help. Least we can do. How can we repay the unrepayable? My thought is no one ever helps with my flooring needs (thinking about hardwoods upstairs) or carpet cleaning whose last name isn’t Croes ever again.

If I still owned Found Objects or any other business, Leo would be the person I trust with my company’s security codes and who I call to get an impossible job done in an absurd amount of time. “Did you work all night,” I asked about just such a business flooring job. “Yes, we worked for four days and nights straight,” he explained. How can you even FIND people willing to live on a job for 4 days in order to meet an impossible deadline? I have friends who work on computers that hard, but put them flat on a floor and they cry FOUL and go home (fast).

Leo didn’t accomplish that impossible business flooring job alone, but you know he helped, supported, coached and trained. Leo doesn’t phone in his life. He is present every moment and that is why you hire Triangle Carpet Specialists. That is why you want a Marine trainer and former Pfizer manager cleaning your carpets and laying down new floors in your home or business. We honor Triangle Carpet Specialists as the first Atlantic BT Customer of the Week. We say THANK YOU to Leo, his family and every Marine or service man and woman. Leo you help us be Americans. The world is a strange and hostile place, we live here and are who we are on the strong backs of people like you, on the steady backs of Marines who train Marines.

Thanks.

Contact Triangle Carpet Specialists
Telephone: (919)906-2218
Web: Triangle Carpet Specialists
Contact Triangle Carpet Specialists

Not an Atlantic BT customer but want us to talk about your cool business? We are building a “Startup of the Week” feature too, and we are always interested in cool stuff our clients or other Triangle business are doing. Even if you don’t work with us we’re still interested in your story. Come by the Atlantic BT Center outside Macy’s Crabtree Valley Mall to chat or we can grab lunch across the street. There are always five ways we can work together. Let’s find them :).

Want to become an Atlantic BT customer? Here is a link to our Contact form, my direct line and cell are below.

Thanks,

Martin

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Martin Smith
Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com
T: 919.256.4145
C: 919.360.1224