“The best things in life are free”, they say, and organic search traffic might seem free at first glance.

But in truth, as you will know, organic search isn’t free at all. It requires hard SEO work upfront before you can rank well for highly coveted keywords.

This wizard is the third example of an expert system that I got a chance to work on now. The wizards aim to help web analysts (and in this case also search engine marketers) with their complex work. Earlier releases were the wizards for PPC optimization and troubleshooting a drop in website conversions.

Couple comments and observations:

“Hey, in 2010 let’s be strategic with our web analytics. Let’s not get lost in the tactical weeds”

OK, so what’s a web analytics strategy vs. tactic then?

• The web analytics solution that you use is a tactic. The strategy is in the reports that you run.
• The reports that you run are a tactic. The strategy is to start with your key performance indicators (KPIs)
• The KPIs are a tactic. The strategy is to equip, free up, and incentivize your web analytics team so that they will focus on value generating analytics vs. lolligagging or answering to never ending reporting requests
• The web analytics team and incentives are a tactic. The strategy is to compete on analytics
• Competing on analytics is a tactic. The strategy is to treat your customers well
• Treating your customers well is a tactic. The strategy is to increase their lifetime value to your company
• Your company is a tactic. The strategy is to have a happy, healthy, peaceful 2010

Some people wield the words “strategy vs. tactic” as if they were swinging a sword and being profound. Yet they mean not much more than “left vs. right”.

Social Marketing is customer-centric marketing. After all, the company is ideally meant to build its brands by first building support and enthusiasm among its customers.

But social media are challenging and humbling. The discussion of how marketers should go about using them is often clouded by vague recommendations, niche anecdotes, and buzzword mania.

The confusion has also impacted marketing analysts. More than ever they are facing questions of what can be measured and how. But very often there is neither a clear business goal nor action plan behind the question.

In order to select meaningful analytics for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs and videos, the key (as always) is to start with the business goals that your company is pursuing with each social media marketing effort.

But, as author Jim Novo pointed out, your team must come clean on what these business goals really are.

I used to doubt the value of Twitter and recently became a cautious convert. But this week, I turned into a Twitter lover.

What did it for me?

Well, I was watching the tweets come across the ticker in real time on Tuesday while Google were announcing new features for one of their popular products in a session at a conference in Washington D.C., some 2,500 miles away from me.

It was exciting and like being there in person.

Thanks to tweets, e.g. by @June_Li. What a great use of Twitter.

But as you know, Twitter has a big problem:

It hasn’t found a business model.

And, famously, Twitter users also have a problem:

The vast majority of tweets are boring and a nuisance.

Some tweeters tweet more often than they have interesting things to share. It's a new form of spam! There should really be a frequency cap.

Twitter could do everybody and themselves a big favor and solve both problems with a single strike.

I’d propose they should charge an increasing price for each tweet per person per day, e.g. as follows:

Just about a year ago, I had the chance to publish my book on mutlichannel marketing metrics. The aim was to create a "how to" book that would enable analytics oriented marketers to integrate online and offline data.

Why bother?

Because customers interact with our companies across online and offline channels. They may see our ads on TV, do their research on the web site, yet purchase in our store.

Therefore, both the person tasked with putting an ROI value on the TV ad as well as the direct marketer benefit from knowing how to integrate insights across online and offline.

But now it is a year later.

And the good question that I want to check on is whether more companies have turned the idea of online-offline integration into reality.

In the past 12 months, I have had the chance to tour through Europe and US to speak with many marketers from online and more traditional sides of the house.

Here is what I am finding as to how far companies have come.

When it comes to Twitter, I have been siding with the naysayers who think:

1. I don't care what other people seem to be having for lunch nor what they type into their mobile phones when stuck at the airport
2. I am not important enough - why should anyone follow me

So I have been writing the whole Twitter thing off as a silly and increasingly annoying fad.

Granted, you can search.twitter.com to learn what the market place is interested in. You can also respond to disgruntled individuals to mend their dissatisfaction with your company.

But this post is about speaking, i.e. tweeting, not listening. Why would I ever want to do that?

Two things changed my mind.

While it isn’t yet quite the online-offline integration that is my pet peeve, a new era of web marketing and web analytics seems to have begun. I think this will be a very exciting precursor to online-offline integration.

This era deserves its own name, so I would like to propose “On-site - off-site integrated marketing”.

On-Site Off-Site integrated marketing

The ability to nit your web site, email marketing, SEM, display advertising, etc. so closely together that they work together as one intelligent organism rather than silo’d, uncoordinated online channels.

The signs that this new era is upon us are everywhere:

Behavior triggered, personalized email marketing

For the longest time email marketing has been a matter of newsletters and email blasts. If at all, emails may have been personalized based on links that a reader clicked in previous emails (by capturing the click-through with a redirect). But if the reader hated the destination page and dropped off she would still be getting more of that same content next time. (arghhh!)

Let's face it: we just can't handle anything that is free. Whenever something appears to be free, e.g. all-you-can-drink soda, the environment, healthcare, or email, we over-consume and abuse it.

Only when consumption has a price do we start to ponder what the optimal amount is that we want to consume.

Well, that observation has been at the heart of a disagreement between online and offline direct marketers. Offline direct marketers have always had to calculate a cost for contacting prospects with a direct mail or tele sales. But for online marketers the cost of an extra email, or banner, or SMS is negligible.

That difference has led to a different approach to marketing between online vs. offline marketers.

Facing the economic pressure of significant variable costs, offline direct marketers have been forced to reduce their contact list by predicting the top deciles that are most likely to care about an offer at hand. Click to expand the table below if you are unfamiliar with this. (this example is from my Multichannel Metrics book)

Given these lousy economic times, most marketers are eager to make more out of what they already have. And one thing that web marketers have plenty of are clicks and visitor interactions.

How could we make more out of those for the business? (other than the obvious answer, i.e. raising online conversion rates, yada yada)

My colleague Jay Henderson kindly pointed me to an interesting idea at Cabela's, the outdoors outfitter. Cabela's are a multichannel retailers with stores, catalog, call center, and of course a web site.

Back in April, an announcement appeared in press that Cabela's will be testing a fascinating idea of making more out user generated content online. Remember, companies such as PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice that engage web site visitors in creating product reviews, i.e. ratings and sometimes even tags? A while back on this blog we were discussing whether those reviews lift sales or not.

Recently, I received a tough question from a well known web analyst:

“I was trying to think through how to measure the impact of Affiliate advertising. Do you know of a way to measure if there is incremental lift due to advertising with an affiliate?”

Huh? Don’t you just check the reports in the affiliate marketing network, say LinkShare or Commission Junction? Or isn’t that a simple referral report in your web analytics?

“We have a pesky problem of having lots of customers that would have found their way to our site without the additional advertising.”

Oh boy!

Wholly, cow … that is a tough question! What is the credit that the affiliates truly deserve, i.e. the portion of sales through Affiliates where customers would - not - have purchased the product directly from the manufacturer’s site anyway?

In the offline world an equivalent question exists: What is the credit that my resellers or distribution network deserve, i.e. the portion of their sales where customers would - not - have come to the manufacturer’s own stores or call-center anyway?

So how could either question be researched? In these economic times you want to be sure not to be rewarding marketing channels for business that you would have received anyway.