To a rather large degree we all paint reality with a thick coat of paint in an attempt to see what we want to see rather then what is really there. Constructing our own version of reality may be just what a business owner needs to to avoid pulling her hair out at the end of every business day.

Graphs and charts can be helpful in bringing small business owners out of their own self created view of reality, but it is important to remember that charts and graphs only tell us how others are perceiving the thick coat of paint they put on their daily view of reality.

Having just ranted about painting reality in our own image, below you will find the latest chart from MarketingSherpa. The chart shows how a group of business people view SEO when it comes to their business. The one thing I would have liked to see is, of those B2B respondents what percentage have at least a a small presence in building community around their products and services. In other words how would the B2B answers differ if the business owner is engaging the community say with a forum.

The Efficiency of SEO Objectives by Primary Market

I’m always wondering about small business and what they consider to be important when it comes to marketing their goods and services not just online but offline as well. I understand that new small businesses (less then 3 years in operation) have a tendency to operate with lots of fear that they will not succeed but what about commercial entities that have a successful track record, do a large percentage of them also operate out of fear and not out of innovation and risk taking?

This morning MarketingSherpa published another interesting chart in their long series of interesting charts. The chart lays out how business is thinking when it comes to outsourcing marketing activities. The info is a year old but surely still helpful and relevant to understanding the thinking of business.

You can read a bit more at their site, just click on the chart.

I’ve seen the differing statistics and listened to the idle chatter about how under 10% of the users on twitter create over 80% of the content on the service. We all know that the 90/10 rules seems to be deeply embedded in all things online, 10% lead and 90% follow. Some sources site a slightly different rule of 80/20, but not matter which one you subscribe to there are always many more followers then leaders.

A new survey shows that just 7% of the U.S. population use Twitter. I would have thought it would have been a larger number but twitter does demand a rethinking of how you communicate and many might not want to wrap their brain around that new way. MarketingProfs has the whole analysis of the new survey in today’s blog post. Twitter Catches Up With Facebook in Awareness It is a wealth of great info, check it out.

When I talk with clients about Video most freak out telling me maybe some other time. The fear they express comes from the unknown so I show them examples to ease that fear. Today I ran across a video that does everything right. Remember this is video on the web I’m talking about not a cinematic masterpiece.

Video on your website needs to be short, I’d say around 2 minutes is a good benchmark and the video needs to have a purpose that engages the viewer.

Jim Lahey Reviews The New Domino’s Pizza from Ozersky.TV on Vimeo.

A while back ( Jan 2010) I shared a video from Domino’s introducing their new pizza and talked about how they nailed the presentation. I liked the new pizza and I like the above interview. Go figure….

The numbers don’t get thrown around very much and I hear more jokes about Bing then I hear suggestions to take it seriously but the fact remains, 24% of users used Alternatives to Google in December 2009. Of course you want your website optimized for Google but you don’t want to forget to find your way over to Bing and the other also-rands to see what they are doing and what they have to say.

Nielson released a new report today that I have added below on search usage from Dec of 2009. Clearly and to no ones suprise Google had maintained its dominant role within the US.

There is a huge group of people using alternative search and this creates a huge question. Are there things I can do to make my business stand out more on Bing and its ilk that are different then what I already do optimize for Google? The easiest answer is to spend some time poking around in those communities and read the posts in search forums, things your SEO Consultant should already be doing (they are doing that right?)

Don’t ever let it be said that bad reviews have no value in marketing your business or nonprofit. It’s a given, when things go wrong businesses can use the momentum from the disaster to motivate employees and speed up critical development. If your on top of this critical thinking you can jump start the motivation even before an analysis of the problem has commenced.

But using disaster to create a marketing campaign might seem like an idea that better resides in outer space. Think what your peers would say if you suddenly showed up on TV or the Web telling your customers you’d dropped the ball and your products are not what they should be. You can just imagine the scene outside your headquarters when the shareholders show up waving torches and brandishing pitchforks yelling for blood. Maybe the best way is to create the campaign around the missteps at the same time you introduce the solution.

Domino’s has done just that, they have created a campaign entitled Pizza Turnaround creating a website and producing a video that celebrates their new pizza while openly showing people who hated the old product. It’s not a new idea Domino’s is using to market themselves, but they do it brilliantly.

Did I call and try one of their new pizzas? You bet I did, and while the real test is will the pizza taste good when I order it 6 months down the road, the one I got the other night was very good and a huge improvement over the last few experiences with this brand. When I think of ordering a pizza for delivery Domino’s is back in the mix because of the taste of their product but without the marketing campaign I would never have called them. Bravo!

Yesterday Pew Internet released another in a long line of in-depth surreys they have complied. The Pew Internet and American Life Project is a nonprofit “fact tank.” This report is simply entitled Internet, Broadband and Cell Phone Statistics

What they found is good news for both consumers and for all those businesses that rely on the internet to drive new business to their websites and also to help maintain their current customer base.

Pew Research said:

In a national survey between November 30 and December 27, 2009, we find:

• 74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the internet – a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. At that time we found that 79% of English-speaking adults use the internet.
• 60% of American adults use broadband connections at home – a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009.
• 55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone.  This figure did not change in a statistically significant way during 2009.

Income and Education benchmarks are good news for small businesses offering products and services marketed or sold on the internet. 83% of those making 50,000 – 74,999 are online and use the internet while their brethren making 75,000+ are represented by a whopping 94% internet usage. Users with some college education use the internet at a rate of 87% and 94% of those with a college education are hooked up to the internet. The future looks bright for online marketing as 93% of those in the 18-29 age group report being hooked up to the internet.

Even if the economy does not roar back this year and instead putt-putts its way into summer there are tremendous opportunities to tap into this vast reservoir of users. I hope everyone will make it their resolution to create Useful, Unique and Updated content for their website, it surely is the number one way to get ranking, find users and service loyal customers.

2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for innovation, and everyone is telling us to look forward to new opportunities in the New Year but few are pointing to concrete examples of those opportunities.

The NTY today ran another story (Adding Fees and Fences) about the growing call from large media producers for pay-as-you-go content sites, these sites will charge a fixed or ala-carte amount for their newly designated premium media content. The usual suspects are falling in behind Rupert Murdoch’s crotchety dark-age leadership with cries that they are being ripped off.

One can’t help but remember the last decade of these same shouts from the likes of the RIAA, and even today the NYT dragged out the dinosaur argument that file swapping was the primary culprit that killed the music industry’s golden egg (shame on your NYT). Murdoch and his greed infested followers are opening the door for all small businesses and organizations to create new and exciting collaborations that will help to quickly fill this void and further send these fossils into the grave.

What this is really about is not what they would have you believe. News Corp and the other relics are struggling to hold on to power, the power to control content from start to finish and they stay awake at night worrying about competition. The titans like Murdoch are really monopolists who talk about the benefits of capitalism and competition while all the while doing there best to stifle it. There is nothing fair or balanced in an economic system that rewards those who practice the craft of monopoly while at the same time punishes innovators and entrepreneurs.

Small business and nonprofits can benefit mightily from the dinosaurs walling themselves off. Small business entrepreneurs can take the lead in creating alliances that create content and products, getting them to market faster and cheaper then the old guard could ever hope to. The water in the kettle is about to boil sounding the call to innovation and over the next couple of months I will share some collaboration ideas to help make these behemoths obsolete.

Over my first cup of coffee this morning I read a couple of articles about Google rolling out its new search feature that adds almost instant results from Twitter, Facebook, Google News and other resources to your search results.

My first thought was oh no now people will see a bunch of crap but I soon realized the results are not part of normal search and that the user must choose to view Real-Time results. I have not seen any figures on how many people click on the specialized search options within Google or any other search engine and for that reason I can’t say how this may or may not disrupt the carefully crafted optimization of websites using SEO to place their sites higher up on search engine result pages (SERP). I do however think at this moment business users and nonprofits need not panic, for companies actively involved in SEO/SEM this may be something to add to your tool box and viewed as an additional opportunity to be seen.

Some people see Twitter and social media as a Siren Call actively seducing your business  into the cliffs and causing certain destruction, I don’t share this view. Twitter and other media properties are more like a huge crowd on the beach waving to you as you sail by, there really is no seduction going on just a huge roar with lots of flailing arms trying to get your attention. If you or your SEO firm use their handy spy glass you can find the gems amongst the teaming crowd, you can part the din to find what offers you the most value and helps bring success to your business or nonprofit.

Try tweeting during business and dinner hours for both the East and West Coast in the US and similar times in other regions of the globe. If search engines are really tuning into Real-Time tweets and its ilk then this is where you stand to get your best return for effort. Try blogging  in the US. between 9:00 and 10:00 AM East Coast time and then tweet and tweet again at 12:15 PM to catch the East Coast lunch crowd, follow upon that will tweets at 4:00 and 6:00 PM Eastern and then monitor traffic and mentions for a week remembering to monitor Latest Results in Google

UPDATE:  Ok I jumped the fence on some of my remarks above. today I see a real time window for Latest Results in the middle of the SERP’s, and it appears that the more popular the event or news the faster the small window scrolls. People not interested in these type of results will quickly learn to skip them and keep their attention on the search task at hand. The new results will distract people who want to be distracted.