The challenge for a small business is the same challenge facing any business: How do you get enough people to pay attention to your ads while they are busy uploading photos or conversing with friends?

Banner ads may sound like an antiquated way to get noticed, but actually display advertising is becoming much more interesting due to two important trends.

One such trend is better local ad targeting.

Several companies, such as Local.com, LinkedIn and Facebook, have announced that they’re getting into the local targeting game by offering geography-based advertising along with the standard demographic or keyword targeting you’d expect. Local targeting is already prevalent in search engine marketing and it’s good to know that display ads are heading in the same direction.

The other noticeable trend to get excited about is the movement toward ad pricing based on cost-per-action rather than cost-per-click.

Paying for ads based on CPA means that you don’t pay the publisher until you get the action you want from the ad. For example, if you want your online display ad to drive someone to an online store to buy the advertised product, you won’t have to pay until someone actually clicks the ad and completes the purchase. Several companies have announced an emphasis on CPA tracking and billing.

Online Retail Promotions

Selling physical goods has long been about driving traffic to your e-commerce store so prospective customers can see and buy your products. That trend seems destined for a giant turn in the opposite direction, because it won’t be long before smaller retailers have the ability to sell more of their products on other highly targeted consumer websites.

One such website is Milo.com, where the CEO announced the company’s intention to enable anyone to search real-time availability and local product information on every product, on every shelf, in every local business in America.

Another outstanding innovation for online retail comes from Pixazza. Pixazza is changing the way consumers shop by allowing people to browse and buy products that appear in any photos.

For example, let’s say you’re reading an article in an online entertainment magazine and you see a photo of Jennifer Lopez wearing earrings that are to-die-for. Getting yourself a similar pair is easier than ever; as you hover over the photo Pixazza recommends earrings at suggested prices far below what Jennifer Lopez probably paid for hers.

You can also use this type of technology on video email campaigns, it increases your CTR (Click-through rate) tremendously!!

Social Media Advertising

Social media is arguably the most innovative internet tool to emerge since, well, the internet. There are definitely good reasons to advertise on social media sites (this includes your own fan pages and networks). The challenge for a small business is the same challenge facing any business: How do you get enough people to pay attention to your ads while they are busy uploading photos or conversing with friends?

There are a number of companies working to make social media advertising more engaging and even fun, and it won’t be long before there are a plethora of choices for small budgets.

There are interesting video advertising products with built-in games and quizzes to get people to pay attention and remember the content in the videos, and others offer access to an integrated suite of social media applications designed to attract attention and engagement in exchange for a subscription of just a small fee per month.

Mobile Marketing

Advertising and messaging to mobile phones is definitely a hot topic among marketers.

In the past, most mobile marketing tools focused on only one aspect of mobile marketing, such as text-messaging, application development or mobile websites. Those tools are now converging as integrated solutions.

One such company, 2ergo, recently announced plans to offer a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions that include SMS, MMS, e-mail and mobile websites. Be on the lookout for companies offering comprehensive mobile solutions priced for small businesses in the not-too-distant future.

Make sure at least a portion of your website is designed to display and function properly on mobile devices – especially the pages that contain contact information for your business.

If you have a location-based business, start making your communications more mobile friendly so people can respond to your offers and information while they are on-the-go.

Sending text-messages and e-mails with mobile coupons and snack-sized bites of product information are great places to start. Also, social media users are more likely to become mobile savvy than the average internet user, so make sure you have a presence on the most common social sites.

The result:

The Nielsen survey of users’ habits found that 67% of all those going online were spending time at social network and blogging sites.

Facebook is grabbing more and more of web users' time.

Interest in the category is growing four times faster than the other top four sectors, said the report. In the UK one in every six minutes of the average web user is spent at a social site, it found.

“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” said John Burbank, chief executive of Nielsen Online in a statement.

“Social networking will continue to alter not just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large,” he said.

Nielsen measures interest in categories by the percentage of the web audience that regularly visit such sites. The latest statistics suggest that 65.1% of web users use web e-mail but 66.8% are turning up at social network sites.

This means, said Nielsen, that about one in every 11 minutes a web user is online is spent at one of the sites Nielsen counts in its “Member Communities” category which includes both blogs and social network sites.

Of these sites, Facebook has highest average time per user, found Nielsen.

The researchers also found that social networking sites are managing to reach a very broad swathe of web users. The fastest growing segment of users turning up and using social sites over the last year was among 35-49 year olds.

In particular, the report noted, almost a quarter of Facebook’s users were known to be over 50 years old.

More and more people want to get at their favourite social network site and update via mobile, found Nielsen. In the UK the numbers of Britons looking at a social site via their phone was up 249%.

Source: BBC

Looking ahead to 2014, Gartner estimates that 3 billion of the world's adult population will be able to conduct transactions via mobile or Internet technology.

Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013, according to a new forecast by research firm Gartner. That’s an even more aggressive outlook than Morgan Stanley’s projection that the mobile Web will outstrip the desktop Web in five years.

Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

But the firm warns that many sites still are not optimized for the mobile Web, even though cell users expect to make fewer clicks on their phones than on a PC. To successfully expand into mobile, publishers will have to reformat sites from the small form-factor of handheld devices.

Looking ahead to 2014, Gartner estimates that 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to conduct transactions via mobile or Internet technology. “Cash transactions will remain dominant in emerging markets by 2014, but the foundation for electronic transactions will be well underway for much of the adult world,” according to the firm.

In a more qualitative prediction, Gartner says that by 2015, context will be as key to mobile consumer services and relations as search engines are to the Web. Where search provides the key method for organizing information and services on the Internet, context will be critical to delivering personalized user experiences on smartphones.

“Context will center on observing patterns, particularly location, presence and social interactions. Furthermore, whereas search was based on a ‘pull’ of information from the Web, context-enriched services will, in many cases, prepopulate or push information to users,” stated the report. New offerings like Google’s “Near me now” feature — providing information on nearby business and services based on a mobile user’s location — come to mind in that vein.

Gartner added that any Web company that doesn’t become a mobile context provider risks handing over customer ownership to a competitor that is providing location-aware or other services that create context for users. As Gartner expects Facebook to be the hub of the social Web by 2012 (it’s not already?), it should also play a key role in social networking to mobile phones.

Three important issues are raised in the article by MediaPost on the Gartner research.

Mobile To Outpace Desktop Web By 2013

1. Most companies have not optimized their websites for the Mobile Web. To have a good presence on the Mobile Web, an adjusted website for the device must be set in place.

2. Context will be key for mobile just as search engines are for the Web. The context will be able to service the user personalized relevant content (in time).

3. Search engines were based upon pulling information to users at their request, mobile on the other hand will be able to prepopulate or push information on unique aspects as the context, the person and content wanted at that point of time.

Companies need to start thinking about any implications the Mobile Web might have for their business and target groups. Fast consecutive occuring life-cycles will make it much more difficult to intervene when the mobile has come to its peak of importance. A technology like Augmented Reality, which is going to grow the coming years, will even grow further by this, where it could be possible that Proximity Marketing will have a second more contextually relevant chance. Last but not least, this could impact media convergence as well, where TV, PC and Mobile will blend into new cross-media experiences which shall depend much on Mobile as well.

What is your take on this?

Source: Gartner Research

Social media has evolved into an every day way of interaction and communication for a large part of the population. And this evolution started in the last century when social media commenced amidst the original chats in chatrooms and blogs. The first blog was

How do we measure the effectiveness of your brand's social media marketing campaigns?

created in the late 1980′s: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/ and it is still alive and well today. Online dating sites, also a part of social media, started with online chats and became famous in 1988 with the movie “You’ve Got Mail”. In 2008, one out of nine couples that got married that year, actually met online. It is expected that the U.S. online dating market will reach $932 million in 2011.

Companies are starting 2010 with sparkling new social media campaigns and everybody knows it’s about the engagement, right? So, how do we measure the effectiveness of your brand’s social media marketing campaigns?

The ultimate approach to social media marketing campaign measurement will look at the things that really matter: sales, profits, customer satisfaction and loyalty. But that may take some time and you need to know how to gage the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign to see if you are headed in the right direction in order to meet those objectives. Therefore, I wanted to share with you 25 social interaction metrics of key performance indicators to use with your social media marketing campaign. This is not an exhaustive list neither it is listed by order of importance and each social media marketer needs to identify the ones that are most suited for them.

I hope you find them useful and that you feel free to share additional ones with us and with our readers.

1. CTR
2. Re-Tweets/Mash-ups/Re-posting
3. Bookmarks
4. Comments
5. Downloads
6. Email / newsletter subscriptions
7. Number of Fans/Followers
8. Feedback
9. Forward to a friend/Invite / Refer
10. Amount of Group activity/interaction
11. Number of downloads or widget installations
12. Key page post-activity
13. Ratings
14. Onsite Messaging
15. Posts
16. Number of Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
17. Report spam / abuse
18. Reviews/ Testimonials
19. Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc)
20. Tagging (user-generated metadata)
21. Time spent on key pages
22. Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
23. Total contributors (and % active contributors)
24. Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
25. Views (videos, ads, rich images)