Last Monday, I was interviewed about social media on Job Search Radio. I spent about 20-30 minutes speaking about using social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to find a job, and also discussed the RichmondJobNet site that we put together for the Greater Richmond Partnership.

Listen to the show here

This isn’t a political post, rather to show you how not to keep your “customers” up-to-date. After hearing today that the bill the US Senate passed last night included hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for manufacturers of wooden arrows for children, Puerto Rican rum manufacturers and American Samoa. Wanting to read the bill myself (all 400+ pages, I hear), I went to senate.gov.

The fact of the matter is that you, the American citizen — the “customer” — won’t find any mention of the bill on the Senate’s homepage. Matter of fact, I spent 20 minutes searching for it, and think I found it, but I’m still not sure because half of the bill isn’t about the economy. I turned to a news site that offered a clear link to the legislation, and I found:

Sec. 308. Increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
Sec. 314. Indian employment credit.
Sec. 502. Provisions related to film and television productions.
Sec. 503. Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

…and the list goes on.

Why do the American people detest Congress? Perhaps it’s because Washington doesn’t provide us adequate usable access to the legislation that crosses the floor. Here’s a link to the bill, and if you’re for or against it, call your Senator or Representative, but good luck trying to find their contact information on their web sites.

Many retail ecommerce web sites ended 2007 with a bang according to Nielsen Online and MegaView Retail. Of sites that had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month of December, here are the top 10 sites with the best conversion rates:

The Popcorn Factory: 29.5%
L.L. Bean: 23.6%
Abebooks: 20.6%
Hollister: 17.6%
Amazon: 17.6%
Lands End: 17.2%
Coldwater Creek: 17.1%
QVC: 17.1%
Cabela’s: 16.8%
Gymboree: 16%

See the chart for yourself at MarketingCharts.com.

Showing holiday shipping cutoff dates on your web site makes sense for many reasons. First, it sets the customer’s delivery expectation. Second of all, it will reduce the number of calls you’ll get asking if an order will be delivered by the holidays.

You should show this information in 2 places — the homepage and in checkout. I typically favor a rather prominent link on the homepage to a dedicated page that discusses holiday shipping. In checkout, you’ll want some messaging saying something like “Order by December xx to ensure holiday delivery.”

One thing we do effectively on the Virginia Favorites site is to list the estimated shipping date on every product page. This, combined with the holiday shipping information that lists cutoff dates, helps the customer determine if their order will arrive in time.

Before traffic starts to spike for the holidays, audit your paid search program (Google Adwords, etc.) for bids, new keyword combinations, and ad copy. You may want to create multiple ads for each ad group so you can quickly see which ad performs better. Also, make sure each of your ads click to a relevant page on your site.

For example, if you are bidding on “buy widgets,” make sure your ad headline has “buy widgets” in it and the ad, when clicked, goes directly to a page on your site that sells widgets. The homepage of your site is often not the best destination for a paid search engine ad.

It’s common convention for customers to register in order to check out, but many customers want to skip that step. While this may involve some IT involvement to make it happen, you can always ask the customer to save their information in an account after the purchase has been made.

If you must require customers to register, make sure they know the benefits of doing so, such as the ability to see order history, track orders as they ship, save shipping addresses, etc. When putting messaging on the screen to this effect, be succinct but descriptive.

Shipping costs are a barrier to online shopping, so offering free shipping can be a great way to increase sales if it doesn’t significantly erode your profits. Sometimes, sites offer “free shipping on orders over $x” to prevent significant profit erosion. You may also choose to offer this only to e-mail subscribers, best customers or promote this for a short period of time (one day, for example).

My clients have had good success with exclusive free shipping offers as well as “free shipping on orders over $x.” If you opt for “free shipping on orders over $x,” find an appropriate dollar cutoff by finding out what your site’s average order size is, then increase it by a small amount.

Customers get confused when sites don’t make it obvious that they’ve added something to their shopping cart. These days, it’s common for sites to have a “persistent shopping cart” — or a running tally of the number of items and total price of items in their cart — on every page. If your site has a persistent cart, make sure your site alerts the customer that they have added something to their shopping cart.

Many sites simply add the product with no alert, while others alert customers with messages that go unnoticed. This results in the customer asking “Did this product get added to my cart or not?” I recommend sending the customer to a shopping cart page when they click add to cart. If you choose not to do this, consider putting a bold, shaded message at the top center of the page just below your site’s main category links. Then add a link to the shopping cart just after the message.

Putting links to “similar items,” “related items,” “best sellers” or accessories on individual product pages helps provide a logical next step when a customer realizes that a product might not fit their needs.

Be careful though — this can be detrimental if these cross-sells take up more real estate and draw more attention than the actual product you’re trying to sell. Remember that product images draw the eye’s attention, so use them sparingly or use small thumbnails when advertising cross-sells.

Your nicely designed web site has pretty “add-to-cart” buttons that match the rest of your site, but are they blending in? Many of today’s graphic designers think that small add-to-cart buttons that match your site’s color scheme will be more aesthetically pleasing. But do you really want your add-to-cart button to blend in?

Imagine your add-to-cart buttons bigger and then have your designer create an add-to-cart button that is a size bigger than that. Choose a color for the button that stands out visually.

How do you know when your button is big enough? The first thing a customer should notice on an individual product page is the product image, the next is the add-to-cart button.

It’s a fact that even the “big boys” of internet retail leave money on the table, and GrokDotCom does a good job pointing out real examples of how large retailers could improve their conversion rate. My favorite is their latest screencast that shows how one of Petco’s Google Adwords ads clicks to a page that shows no products.

No matter the size of your ecommerce site, you should check out GrokDotCom’s conversion rate screencasts and see examples of how ecommerce sites fail at converting visitors to paying customers. By viewing these, you may get ideas for improving your own site.

Looking for a good read on marketing? Ad Age has just the thing for you — its Power 150 media and marketing blogs. Included in the list are some of the more popular blogs (and personal favorites) like Duct Tape Marketing, the SEOmoz blog and GrokDotCom. Our friends at RKG even cracked the list with their blog.

Here are some others that I follow, and while these aren’t on the list, they should be because of the quality of the information they provide:

• Campaign Monitor Blog: This marketing blog primarily features e-mail marketing tips.
• Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog: Ecommerce blog covering usability, design and marketing.
• MarketingVOX: How did they miss this one? Features the latest online marketing news.
• Marketing Experiments blog: A more quantitative look at online marketing.
• Smiley Cat: Christian Watson’s Web Design Blog: Discusses topics in web design.

The latest Marketing Sherpa brief arrived in my inbox today and had some great insight into sending marketing e-mail to BlackBerry and mobile device users. While marketing to users with mobile devices is still under the radar of most marketing executives, it’s prudent to know that business users are adopting these devices and reading carefully crafted HTML e-marketing campaigns on them.

Here are my takeaways from the article. Feel free to read yourself — you can access the article for free until August 1st.

• 64% of key decision makers are viewing email (and your company email marketing campaign) on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.
• BlackBerrys are more heavily used by business users than Treos and iPhones. BlackBerry users are younger (under age 45).
• You don’t have to communicate with BlackBerry users with all-text messages. While text messages are the best strategy, multipart-MIME messages (HTML and text version in the same message — the email client decides which to display) can be a good option.
• Companies should market to mobile device users separately so display issues don’t occur. The best way to do this is survey your customer base or ask for mobile preferences on a newsletter sign-up page.
• Messages should be crafted differently than traditional e-mail marketing. Message width and wording are both considerations. Displays on newer BlackBerry devices are 320 pixels wide.
• Your company name should be the first thing the user sees, followed by a short “hook” or offer. Personally, I liked the way Marketing Sherpa advises marketers to “be brief, be brilliant and be gone.” Mobile device users scan email, not read it.

The article also provides a link to download Blackberry simulators in case you’d like to see how your company’s e-mail marketing messages look on the BlackBerry platform.

Finally, I feel that while BlackBerry devices are the most popular devices right now, iPhone is sure to make a splash among a more consumer-oriented crowd in the next 6 months to a year. Now’s the time to research your customer base to see how many customers read email through mobile devices. If more than 10% do, perhaps it’s time to start a new segment in your e-mail marketing list for mobile users. Besides HTML and text, offer your customers a mobile option when subscribing to your company’s e-mail newsletter.

Newspapers, who have recently struggled to retain advertising revenue, are getting a boost from an unlikely source: Google.

Over the last few months, Google has been piloting a program that offered newspaper ad space to Google Adwords advertisers. That pilot program is likely to lead to an announcement today that Google Adwords advertisers can now buy newspaper ads via their Google Adwords account, reports the New York Times.

More than 225 newspapers are said to be participating in the program, with coverage in 91% of the top 35 media markets.

While newspapers will ask for “rate card” ad rates, advertisers can make a lower offer on the ad space, which will help newspapers fill spaces normally filed by “house ads” which don’t generate ad revenue for the newspapers.

This expanded program will offer online advertisers the opportunity to venture into the print world. I see this as good news for advertisers that want to advertise in print, but it’s either too daunting or expensive when working directly through the newspapers. There’s also the possibility of getting less-than-rate-card rates, which is attractive for small businesses trying to get more advertising coverage in their local markets.

I’m seeing a trend lately with new Google Adwords accounts and wanted to share my findings and get your feedback.

Back on January 11, I set up a Google Adwords account for a new client. We went all out, writing multiple ads for testing purposes, splitting the keywords into similar groups and targeting the ads geographically.

The results, at first, were poor. The campaign got one or two clicks the first couple of days, then went for days without a click. We decided to raise the bids significantly and write landing pages for each ad group that were designed to be highly relevant to the Google Adwords ads to drive conversion.

After we employed a more aggressive bidding strategy and directed ads to landing pages, the clicks started coming in, and just this week we’re seeing much better results. I’m unsure of what factor (the landing pages or the higher bids) had the biggest impact.

I recently read that advertisers should expect to bid higher at first to get desired results. This is good advice for all of you starting new Adwords campaigns. The folks over at MindValley Labs blogged earlier in the month that new advertisers “get crushed” when employing the same bidding strategies as an established advertiser, and they backed it up with test results.

My advice for those starting a new Google advertising campaign is to a) write and design your landing pages before you activate your campaign and b) start keyword bids higher than normal while also setting daily budgets high. Monitor your campaign closely, and if you’re getting a high clickthrough rate, test the effect on clickthrough rate of backing off of your bids gradually.