In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity.

Small business has almost always relied on word of mouth to succeed. There are very few national TV spots and building-side ads trying to pull you into Daydreams Comics in Iowa City, Iowa or Homespun Crafts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unfortunately, word of mouth for a lot of businesses can only go so far. Social media is essentially a rebirth for word of mouth in a digital age. Platforms like Facebook allow small bookstores to broadcast events to an always ready audience, reaching them on their cell phones as well as computers. Twitter is used by many “pop up shops” and mobile businesses to let consumers know where in the city the business can be found that day. Given the incredible success social media has had on small businesses this year, how should these businesses proceed moving forward?

Word of mouth has always been an important part of marketing, both because it is free and because, almost always, the words are going to a person from someone in their life that they trust. This gives credence to the brand and service, as well as giving confidence to the overall purchase decision. If you’re looking for what to do in Chicago, for instance, you are more likely to take the advice of a person you know and trust who has experienced it than from a kid who once saw a movie about Chicago and thought it was okay.

The massive shift to digital has opened up new avenues of marketing, which are ultimately cheaper and hold lots of promise for small businesses who have limited advertising budgets.

Google AdWords Express

In an effort to give small businesses a bit of an edge in catching the attention of customers, Google launched a service called Boost, which would later become AdWords Express. The idea here is that you register your business with Google and when someone searches for stores in your area, you stand out from the usual suspects (read: international corporations show up as red tabs and you show up as a blue tab that automatically sets you apart).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is emerging from the dark shadow of its past to become a massive force in Internet marketing. Large corporations use it to boost their rankings in search engines, but smaller business can use SEO to deepen their potential customer base. SEO is beneficial for one simple reason: people can’t go to your site if they can’t find it. Targeting keywords specific to your business and location will help more people find your site and hopefully walk through the doors of your storefront.

Mobile Marketing

After this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are considerably more smartphones and tablets out on the market. That number is growing as people move away from stationary computer setups toward mobile Internet devices. Companies like Groupon have launched local services that allow small business owners to create offers and deals in real time and beam them to cell phones of customers who could be in your neighborhood. Your deal that day might win you a new regular customer.

The shop small revolution has a lot of support behind it in the shrinking world. People are starting to reject the convenience afforded by huge corporations and re-invest in their communities by shopping small. The movement will likely grow in the coming years and businesses looking to harness the increasing public enthusiasm for “small shopping” will have to evolve their marketing methods with the digital methods cropping up and leverage them to succeed in the current economic landscape.

In marketing products, advertisers zero in on bottlenecks, or places where people get funneled into a small space and end up having to wait in line. Subways, elevators, and checkout lines are bottlenecks for foot traffic, while city interstates and busy intersections are bottlenecks for car traffic.

Bottleneck advertising is especially effective because it reaches a high number of people, but, perhaps more importantly, because it catches those people when they have time to look at the ad and absorb the information.

The same principles can apply to advertising online. Ads are best placed where both the number of users is high and the amount of time that users spend on the site is high. In a physical bottleneck, people are delayed because of spatial constraints, while in an online bottleneck, people only linger on a site if their interest is held by something. So the sites that online advertisers need to pay the most attention to are the biggest “time sinks,” the places where users tend to linger for large amounts of time.

Facebook is far and away the biggest time sink on the web. The total time that people spend on Facebook in a month is estimated at 50 billion minutes, which is more time than people spend on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined. Facebook is obviously exceptionally good at grabbing people’s attention and holding it indefinitely, and therefore a prime site for advertisers.

What makes Facebook such an excellent bottleneck is not just that millions of users log on to it every day and not just that users log in often to check in on their friends, but that the users that log in to Facebook tend to linger there.

Facebook is an exceptional device for holding people’s attention captive. Users can see when their friends are online, which means that when they write on their wall or message them, they can probably expect a reply. Intermittent Facebook chat sessions are a constant back-channel that can gobble up time for students and white-collar workers. Facebook games are also hugely successful at absorbing attention. Farming games and Empire games, the two most-popular genres of Facebook games, both involve built-in wait times before players can proceed. These wait times encourage people to keep logging in as soon as the delay is up so they can grow their city or garden as quickly as possible.

While users are staring at messages waiting for a response or staring at a game screen waiting for a time delay to end, the Facebook ads on the right-hand margin are always there, waiting to suck in the user’s gaze. The ads may not seem all that ostentatious, but they are always there, always changing, and always ready to be clicked.

Facebook ads are different from ads at physical bottlenecks, though, because they can also be intelligently tailored to the user. Users’ personal information is mined to get an idea of what they are interested in, but the users themselves also give feedback on ads they do not like so they will not be bothered by them any longer. With this customized system, computer nerds get ads for gadgets, not for sports equipment, and frugal people get ads for coupons, not for sports cars.

Due to the intelligent tailoring of ads and the fact that they are being posted on the largest online bottleneck, Facebook ads promise to be the most effective form of marketing out there.

 This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Today, September 27th is Google’s 11th birthday and Google has a special logo to celebrate its birthday.

Google is using its logo in marketing for both social and commercial purposes. What Google does with its logo is a good example to use company logos as a valuable marketing tool for free.

Google has changed our lives and still changing; even why we use logos. Happy 11th birthday Google!

Domain parking refers to the registration of an Internet domain name without that domain being used for a website. This may have been done with a view to reserving the domain name for future development, or to protect against the possibility of cybersquatting or to trade the domain name.

There are several companies that specialize in serving adsfor domain owners of parked domains. The ads are relevant to the domain names being used. Most widely-known  companies in the domain parking market are GoDaddy and Sedo. Now, the companies in the domain parking industry are facing a big competitor, Google.

Google have finally opened up its Adsense for Domains service. The service is still available for U.S. domain owners only. This service of Google was available for domain owners with 1+ million monthly pageviews. This shows Google is searching every possible way of earning money from the Internet. You can look at this interesting presentation on our post Everything About Google to learn more about Google’s increase revenue policies.