Goal Setting that Works!

Have you ever worked all day and have nothing to show for it? Get yourself back on track with some simple goal setting and time management techniques that work:

1. Long Term Goals: Take a look at the big picture. What do you want to accomplish in the next three months? The next year? Be specific and write it down - better yet, use Evernote to keep all your notes in one place.
   
2. Write down three things you must do today in order to advance your long term goals. Keep these tasks in front of you all day. Don't deviate from these tasks.
3. Add two more tasks related to current events but not related to your long term goals. Label these as "if I have time."
4. Eliminate ALL distractions. These time-hogs KILL productivity and creativity:

• Close your email client, and only open it 2-3 times per day
• Shut off Twitter,
  
• Disconnect from the internet entirely (yes, we said disconnect from the internet) at a few points throughout the day.

Review your progress every day. Look at your long term goals and set your short term tasks for the next few days.

Try this method for a day. See what happens, and let us know! We think you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish with simple goal writing and distraction busters.

Americans Want Brands That Inform

The top characteristic US consumers want from brands they like is to improve their knowledge—and the least desirable one is for a brand to “only be visible in store”—according to the “Global Web Index” from Lightspeed Research.

Helping consumers keep up to date on topics that were important to them was also key, followed by being entertaining, becoming part of a daily routine, and informing consumers about the product and the company. Consumers were relatively uninterested in brands that tried to act like their friends. Read more from emarketer...

Social Media versus Search Engines for Website Traffic

Getting visitors to your website is a primary goal, but finding loyal visitors is even better. According to research by ad network Chitika, leads generated from Facebook and Digg are more likely to create repeat vistitors than search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. In the course of one week, more than 1/5th of users referred to a website by Facebook visited at least four times. Google-referred visitors were less loyal at 12%. And visitors coming from Twitter were the least likely to return.

But in the bigger picture, social media sites are only sending a small fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that “the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.” Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%. Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals.

What's a web marketer to do? Staying "in the conversation" is more important than ever.Google and Microsoft have both made deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has one with Facebook that integrates Twitter and Facebook updates into Bing search results. Google will soon be adding tweets to search results.

Google's Marissa Mayer says, "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

These Twitter and Bing's deals make it all the more important for marketers to be found in real-time searches and Facebook/Twitter in general:

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about current events
3. Increase your followers
4. Promote conversation with retweets, linked in answers, etc.
5. Include calls to engagement

You have to keep people talking to stay relevant "right now." Subscribe to the Strategy140 blog for upcoming information on these social media marketing tactics.

Genders Rule on Social Networks!

Statistics compiled by Brian Solis from Google Ad Planner data, indicate that men and women are not equal in their preference for social networks. While men and women use sites like LinkedIn and YouTube equally, when it comes to sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and Bebo, women outnumber men. See the infographic by Information is Beautiful

There’s only one major preference for men on the social web: social news site Digg, where 64% of users are male.

What makes women more social? Let us know in the comments.