Words on websites will now be monitored, to the extent that Tweets posted on Twitter and Facebook profiles can be watched to ensure that firms do not give out misleading information. The new legislation can be applied to any communication which constitutes a form of marketing, even if the words are not presented as an actual advert online. Prior to the ruling, the ASA only had jurisdiction over published adverts which were paid for on the web.

The changes to the law have come about as a result of the fact that the ASA have received almost five thousand complaints about wording on websites which contravene basic marketing standards since 2008, and yet as they were not related to paid adverts, the governing authority were powerless to take any action to remove them from the public view.

The chief executive of the ASA, Guy Parker commented: “These are claims that are very similar to the claims that [the public] are used to seeing in adverts that appear in media like TV, radio, posters and print. The new powers will help to tackle a growing number of complaints about the way companies sell themselves on the web. Extending the UK advertising code to non paid-for statements means that these, like paid-for adverts, must not harm, mislead or offend.”

However, Vincent-Wayne Mitchell, the professor of consumer marketing at London’s Cass Business School, has commented: “I could have an advert up on the internet for a week or for an hour, cause widespread confusion, get sales from that, and then withdraw it. The only punishment that the ASA has is withdrawal, but I can have that as part of my own marketing strategy.”

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The metrics produced by MerchantCircle have also showed that the Places application is actively taking business away from competitors, as use of location-based tools have remained static at nine percent for the last two quarters of the year. Despite the increased uptake of the Facebook Places function, many businesses surveyed admit that they do not have the time to devote to the promotion of their business, with almost forty percent of companies questioned stating that they lack the resource to focus upon promotion.

Over half of all businesses spend less than one thousand pounds per year on marketing, and sixty percent of organisations questioned have stated that they do not intend to increase the amount of budget which they allocate to company promotion. Over twenty percent of companies stated that they considered marketing online to be too expensive for their company budget to accommodate.

Facebook Places has now eclipsed rival firm Google’s tools for company marketing, with seventy percent of merchants using Facebook and sixty-six percent utilising Google’s services. This shows an increase of twenty percent from last year. Almost forty percent of people surveyed stated that they found Facebook to be an effective and reliable means of advertising their company products and services online. The data collated by MerchantCircle has demonstrated that Facebook needs to target more small businesses in order to encourage them to use the online marketing possibilities of tools such as Places in order to promote their business online.

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The new wave of enthusiasm for online spending in the US is likely to precipitate a step-change in the way in which UK companies consider utilising SEO capabilities to promote online spending within this country, as the positive growth rate shows an increased appetite for online purchasing. The rate has been consistently high over the last five quarters, showing a positive year upon year increase.

In addition to this rise in consumer spending online, ComScore have demonstrated that the sale of consumer electronics, software, books and magazines have all risen greatly over the time period measured. Other items such as PDAs, toys, games and hobby items have also enjoyed an increase in purchasing trends.

The research has demonstrated that over eighty percent of US consumers online made a transaction over the internet over the last quarter, which has risen by ten percent from the previous year. Time spent online has also remained constant. The report shows that Google is the preferred search engine in the US, with over sixty percent of purchasing queries being put through the site.

ComScore chairman Gian Fulgoni commented: “The 2010 holiday season saw the first billion-dollar day on record and several more surpassing $900 million to help propel Q4 to record spending levels.”

ComScore’s research looked at a number of online consumer trends, including changes in spending trends and patterns, consumer attitudes towards online spending, segmentation according to gender, age and demographics, and an analysis of the key products which were purchased over the period. Overall, the survey has offered SEO experts insight in to digital marketing trends and a preview of the future of e-commerce requirements and customer attitudes.

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The study calls for government agencies to begin regulating the content online to prevent this surge in indirect advertising. Despite the study’s findings, tobacco companies are denying that they are using the web to advertise. The study stated: “Tobacco companies stand to benefit greatly from the marketing potential of Web 2.0, without themselves being at significant risk of being implicated in violating any laws or advertising codes.”

A researcher from anti-smoking group ASH has commented: “The findings of the study are disturbing but fairly typical of tobacco industry activity. As soon as one avenue of promotion is closed, companies will seek out alternative means of promoting their product and will do anything to get round advertising restrictions. It indicates that their key audience is young people. There is a need for much stronger control over what appears on the internet.”

Tobacco companies have denied all claims, saying that it was against their policy to utilise social networking sites to promote tobacco brands, as it would breach advertising laws and international marketing standards.

Tobacco advertising has been banned since 2002. YouTube has stated that it does not accept any advertising from tobacco producers online, globally.

The study analysed twenty pages of content on YouTube with tobacco brand names referenced. They found at least twenty clips which appeared to have been produced to promote the brands.

One of the study’s authors commented: “We can see no functional difference between exposure to tobacco in movies outside the internet, and exposure to video and film material on the internet. Generally, the more tobacco is normalised, the more kids will take it up.”

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The group, which created albums including The Wall, Animals and Dark Side of The Moon, were all released by Columbia Records when they were officially produced, but have come within EMI’s distribution and management since 2000. The albums have been taken off sites including iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store because of the expired EMI contract.

Fans of the group are still able to purchase the albums in CD format, as EMI has a certain amount of stock which they are able to sell off to consumers. However, it is thought that the company will not be permitted to manufacture any further copies of the albums until they have signed another contract. The ruling only affects albums which were produced later on in the band’s career, meaning that earlier collections such as “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” are still available on CD and as digital downloads on EMI.

According to label sources, the management behind the Pink Floyd band were seeking to procure a licensing deal for the entire catalogue of music approximately eighteen months ago. Music firms were asked to submit a presentation outlining how they would market the band’s music and bid for management, but many organisations pulled out after bidding for the catalogue got too expensive.

None of the band members, nor EMI, have commented about the current state of affairs. EMI have recently lost some big names to other companies, including Paul McCartney and Radiohead. When the firm was purchased by Terra Firma three years ago, the acquisition brought debts which it is thought the company has struggled to pay back.

Since 1991, Pink Floyd albums have sold 36.2 million copies in the United States, including 654,000 in 2009 and almost 311,000 this year.

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UKOM, the company which measures online statistics, discovered that new users have shot up to 38.8 million, from 36.9 million twelve months ago. Most users were made up of male users over fifty, giving rise to a host of new services set up to accommodate the culture shift in attitudes to the net.

Alex Burmaster, a spokesperson for UKOM stated: “The internet is getting older in more ways than one. Not only is the medium itself maturing but the audience is shifting towards older age groups. There is a still a perception that the net is youth-centric but this is clearly not the reality.”

The ten most popular sites for people over fifty are ranked as:
• RealAge
• Flixxy
• Saga
• WA Shearings
• Fifty Plus
• FamilySearch
• Hand Picked Hotels
• Lurpak
• JacquieLawson
• Cruise.co.uk.

People who run businesses need to think of the new demographics and plan their sites to accommodate an older audience of surfers. So called ‘Silver Surfers’ are on the increase, and this means online corporations have a responsibility to open their marketing strategies to cater for this new audience of potential customers and net users. Older users now form 31% of web usage in the UK.

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This year it’s really more likely to be a cyber Tuesday as the first Monday of December actually falls on the 7th, a long way into December, but still the principle stands. What’s important is how you as an online retailer prepare for the onslaught of customers your site. The following tips should help…

1. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this doesn’t apply to you. People give crazy things as presents, anything from scart cables to yachts are affected by cyber Monday. Of course, some industries are affected to a greater or lesser extent than others but the principle applies to almost all ecommerce stores.

2. Make sure your PPC account is ready. Do a full check of your PPC account, add all the necessary negative keywords you can to avoid irrelevant clicks and make sure you’re appearing in good positions for keywords that have consistently converted in the past. However, I would shy away from making wholesale changes, you probably won’t have time to deal with the ongoing optimisation necessary to make sure these changes work. Also, if they don’t have the effect you’re anticipating, you may miss out on sales.

3. Up your budgets. Unfortunately, there’s no getting around this. With higher search volumes come higher costs. However, people are also in the mood to buy, so conversion costs should fall sharply too. You don’t want to miss out on potential sales because your account is offline due to lack of funds.

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Even now, with ecommerce so established, many people simply don’t feel comfortable buying online. It’s important to address these concerns even though you, as a seasoned internet professional, probably don’t share them.

Firstly, if you have any official security accreditation, get that out front and centre and make a big deal about the safety of your payment systems.

Also, it’s a good idea to make sure that any pages even remotely connected with payments are clean and professional looking. Anything that looks even slightly bodged on these pages can start to make people suspicious that you are not a legitimate company.

Finally, if you can avoid sending people off site to make a payment then do. I know inbuilt shopping carts can be expensive and time consuming to set up but they are necessary – people have put trust in your site, not your payment provider’s site. Quite apart from this, sending people off site just looks amateurish and disrupts the consistency of your payment process not to mention the fact that if you were trying to steal someone’s card details, install spyware or do anything else dodgy, then sending people offsite is exactly the sort of thing you’d do. This fact is not lost on your customers.

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There are a number of necessary steps when it comes to an E-commerce transaction, many of which need to be done on separate pages. At times it can seem as if the process is never ending with page after page to fill out. A good way to mitigate this frustration is to be up front and honest with your customers about the entire process and map it out in bit sized pieces for them.

Some kind of neat functionality like a check list that gets filled out as you go makes customers feel more at ease, like they know what’s required of them, it also makes the whole thing seem simpler, less of a big deal.

It also makes people aware of how far into the process they are at all times and more importantly how far they have to go. This limits the really annoying phenomenon of losing people just before the payment screen because they get frustrated that it’s taking forever. If they know how close to finishing they are they’re more likely to keep going.

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Always remember, there is only ever a quick tap of the back button stopping a customer from navigating away from your site in frustration. Online customers know they have a choice and thus exhibit a very low tolerance for extra hassle.

Isolate what the bare minimum you need from the customer is and ONLY ask them to supply that information. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to get extra information out of them like ‘how they heard about the site’ or getting them to ‘rate their experience’ – you might get some valuable information, though is it really worth losing sales? If you really must have this information, get it after the customer’s credit card has been billed.

It’s not just about what information you gather, but how you gather that information. For instance, it’s more hassle for a customer to fill in card expiry dates by name of the month as opposed to number, as they have to mentally convert the number on the card to an actual month. This may seem like nitpicking but you really should be interrogating each part of your process in this level of detail to make it as easy as possible.

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Lesson 1: Email addresses not User Names

Because email addresses are used much more regularly than individual user names, they are much more memorable to consumers. For this reason it’s a better idea to have customers sign into their site with their email address. This can seem counterintuitive as email addresses tend to be much longer than most user names though if you think about it, it does make sense. Anyone who is reasonably active on the internet is going to have accumulated several different user names in their time, though nobody really has more than two or three actively used email addresses. Why would you?

This is a particularly good ploy for bigger websites. How annoying is it to try to come up with a user name and find that your first five or so choices are already taken by someone else? An email address is by its very nature unique, so you bypass this process entirely.

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The assumption is that consumers are going online in order to find savings not available on the high street. This reasoning is borne out by the behaviour of consumers online who are researching more meticulously than ever, and not just on big-ticket items either, on all kinds of goods.

So how does someone adapt their ecommerce site to meet the demands of this new kind of online customer. Well, the first is of course, add value – do deals make savings, in general, give your customers a reason to shop with you, then push those savings in your PPC ads.

The new breed of choosy customer has also produced a real spike in the number of people using price comparison sites, so getting yourself on one of these has never been more important. There is however, also evidence that these customers have been doing their own research and legwork via peer reviewing facilities like blogs and message boards.

On the latter point it might be worth reaching out to relevant blogs and content sites, maybe offer a product for review, or sponsor a competition etc.

So, basically, at the moment if you’re a player in the world of online commerce, you need to be cheap and add value. You also need to have a strong off site presence and reputation.

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Firstly, the survey reveals some interesting truths about the perceived wisdom that we are all more comfortable with shopping online now than we were a few years ago. According to the survey, 37% of us agree with the statement ‘I feel no safer when buying online now than I did 5 years ago’ with only 34% disagreeing, proving that the notion of increased ecommerce confidence is more than a little spurious.

Based on these findings, it might be an idea to not be too glib about internet security, have your credentials clearly on display and explain at every step how what the user is doing is safe.

Another thing worth noting from the survey is that, exactly half the respondents would cancel a purchase if their preferred method of payment was not available, so it pays to have a wide selection.

There is good news however, a large number of respondents will not be stopping buying because of the recession, instead they merely intend to shop around more online. The message is clear, if you can lower your prices, do, and expect your PPC conversion rates to drop as people click around more.

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This was taken as discriminatory and the backlash began. Amazon however, have denied that there is a discriminatory policy in place, or in fact any particular policy of removing anything, describing the removal of the work as an ‘issue’ or ‘problem’.

‘It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally.’- Amazon Statement.

So what’s going on? Well, as always, when we know, you’ll know.

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