Power of Social Media???

In a small company, everyone wears lots of hats, and it is my Marketing Hat that drove me to register for a number of publications at Marketing Sherpa including DM News' White Paper of the day.

This morning, that free service delivered me "Secrets of Social Marketing Success" from OneUpWeb. The paper reviews the social marketing strategies of a number of top holiday items, and dovetails both with the writing of this blog, and our launch promotion.

Appeal of Blogs

According to Synovate/Marketing Daily, 4 out of 10 Americans read blogs, so I'm looking forward to hearing from many of you. =) We are in good company, according to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, 19% of the Fortune 500 use blogs. Given that, as Business Week Reports in its November 12, 2007 edition, click-through rates on sites like Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL declined from 0.75% to 0.27% in 2006, it's no surprise that folks would look to more organic sources of traffic.

Member's Only

One of the hot holiday items reviewed is the Robotic Dinosaur Pleo that is being blogged about here and elsewhere. Once consumers own a Pleo, they will be able to participate in Ugobe's "owner's only" online social network with special offerings like new sounds and behaviors for their dinosaurs. (Did I miss the robotic amoeba? Skipping evolutionary steps is Ugobe, but I look forward to the wooly mammoth.)

Mpayy will be a social networking tool insofar as it will provide a quick and free way to transfer money to your friends to split a bill at dinner, or pay money owed for some other purpose. Beyond that, Mpayy is planning a $50,000 contest giveaway at launch once users open up an Mpayy account with a linked checking account. The contest will be hosted by a yet to be decided vendor, but it is unlikely that there will be deeper social networking tools from the get go. Hopefully a series of giveaways around events that go on throughout the year will create a strong desire to participate in the member's only contests for cash giveaways, and in the meantime, members will start to Mpayy and see the value of our products.

Ever Wonder How to Get your Site Visible?

Curiously, as Mpayy has begun to prepare for its launch and begun to contact companies for everything from financing to promotional partnerships, and potential clients, the search engines began displaying an unknown virus as the natural search results for the term Mpayy. Perhaps we should have been flattered, and we were.

However, there was much excitement in the Mpayy offices as we finally got the top spot from Google search results "Under Construction"/"Coming Soon" page that are companies only option for really getting any public face before they launch without throwing advertising dollars completely down the toilet.

The page now has a spinning globe as part of the Mpayy logo. The homepage can be found at http://www.mpayy.com.

In order to get our site crawled by Google's bots, we took two steps.

First, we used Google Analytics which is a free tool from 0-1,000,000 monthly impressions. The reporting interface is phenomenal, and it integrates very well with any online advertising you do as well as tracking links from all over the Net.

Second, Google's Webmaster tools provide the ability to generate a Verification Meta tag that will tell the bots to come look for you. Within two days we went from not showing up at all to #1.

God bless Google and its user friendly technologies.