If you’re a successful business owner with revenues over $1 million, congratulations! You’ve probably solved a number of core business challenges: operations, finance, IT, customer service, sales, and even (if you’re lucky) HR.

But, regardless of how well-oiled the machine, your business probably suffers from anemic marketing. While most of us can sell, manage, and serve our customers, most business owners express frustration with their marketing efforts. Here are just a few comments I’ve heard over the last year:

“Marketing? Yeah, I’ve tried at least three marketing consultants and not one of them has brought an actual dollar’s worth of revenue into my business.”

“We had a marketing person on staff; I realized that when she took a week off, I didn’t miss her.”

“Sales are great. Marketing is terrible; we can’t get it dialed in.”

Of course I’m talking about a very specific group of business leaders: owners who’ve crossed the $1 million revenue threshold, but haven’t reached the 8-figure mark. These owners run businesses big enough to really need marketing in order to grow, but aren’t quite big enough to merit a full team in-house.

The truth is, until you reach that 8-figure mark, marketing done wrong will continue to hurt.

For the small business owner, failed marketing is either one or a combination of three issues: Strategy, Execution, and Accountability. Few businesses get all three right, and most are lucky to hit on just one.

Strategy

Choices. We love ‘em, until we have too many. And when it comes to setting a marketing strategy, the options are simply overwhelming. Social media? Search engine marketing? Direct marketing? Trade Shows? Email? Networking?

Where is that marketing plan?!?! (Didn’t we pay a consultant to write one three years ago? It’s here…somewhere…)

Within the last five years, the marketing landscape has experienced a seismic shift. The old models of schmoozing on the golf course, placing ads in newspapers, and waiting for the phone to ring are increasingly irrelevant (hello, Yellow Pages?). Your customers congregate in entirely new ways, and their influence is more powerful than ever. Yet few of you have succeeded at adapting to the changing marketplace; many throw your hands up in frustration. And your dusty marketing plan doesn’t work because it’s a static document that doesn’t adjust to the fast-moving pace of today’s technology

Execution

Assuming you’ve got a decent strategy (or even a simple marketing framework), you’re faced with the challenge of how to get things done. Most owners are simply too busy running their business that there’s no time left to market what they do. While you may be great at sales, your business’ marketing engine is idling: that website that was supposed to take six months isn’t done a year later; the new product logo still hasn’t made if from an idea in your head to pencil and paper; the sales team still doesn’t have the tools they need to outshine your competition.

Execution and consistency: many businesses want their marketing to look cohesive; getting it done is the hard part.

Most businesses circumvent the execution challenge with strong sales and personal networks. Unfortunately, this painful, “one new customer at a time” approach is usually only good enough to maintain current business levels. Accelerated growth means heavy marketing execution.

Accountability

A few months ago a friend of mine pulled me aside and told me about a conversation she had with her CEO. When the discussion shifted to marketing, the CEO admitted that he wasn’t sure what the marketing department was doing. He thought they were, “doing good things,” but couldn’t quantify their contribution to the bottom line.

Unfortunately, this story is all too common: owners become disconnected from their internal marketing team (if they even have one) and there’s little transparency to marketing efforts. Owners are frustrated because they’re spending money on marketing, but can rarely point to the “wins” brought by the department.

Fixing the marketing mess

Tuning up (or even turning on) your marketing engine won’t happen overnight. However, with a little perseverance, you’ll start to see results. Here are my top 3 recommendations for beating the 3 marketing perils:

1. Make your marketing strategy visual: Rather than writing a marketing plan (marketing plans seldom work), create an oversized poster that outlines your marketing opportunities; hang it in your “war room” and talk about your marketing on a regular basis – monthly or weekly. At Kinesis, we build a “Marketing Blueprint” for our clients – it’s a tool that maps Centers of Influence, Referrers, and Lead Sources. Segmenting your marketing efforts by these three areas is a great way to get your team thinking strategically about their marketing efforts.
2. Build an execution rhythm: Set aside one day a week to address your marketing issues. Make it short and to the point, but take notes and assign action items. We recommend 30-60 minutes. Keep the meetings tactical (focused on getting things done) and save the big strategic meetings for your monthly sessions (2 hours). Once a year, set aside at least half a day to outline the goals for the year.
3. Create a measurement tool: Owners typically measure their finances, evaluate their employees, and review sales numbers. But rarely do they spend the time to truly measure the impact of marketing. Fixing the problem starts with defining what metrics matter to your business. Then, religiously track your numbers. We’ve developed the Kinesis Metrics Dashboard for this purpose, but most businesses can make big strides with Excel and a few simple metrics.

The Kinesis Metrics Dashboard Helps Clients Measure Marketing

Many of us start the year with a strategic planning session. If you haven’t had yours yet, consider setting aside time to discuss how 2012 could be different. If you make marketing strategy, execution, and accountability central to your business, you’ll go a long ways towards switching marketing from a source of pain to a source of revenue.

However given its reach, specificity, and low cost, Facebook should be a part of your marketing strategy. You can read my past post for all my reasons Why. In this article I’d like to focus on the How.

Once you’ve set up your Facebook business page, there are specific ways to leverage your online community to get more attention for your company:

1) Invite all of your friends, vendors, and clients to “Like” your page. You know they already like you in real life, so it will give you some momentum and help your page to not appear like an empty cavern.

2) Make sure all of your staff “Likes” your page. Get your staff to participate on your Facebook page. They are your biggest advocates and can help keep conversations going. Big tip: Each week at your staff meeting, have everyone write down one thing to post on your Facebook business page and then use one of these ideas as your daily update.

3) Hit the magic 25. By doing 1 and 2, you should be able to hit 25 fans. This is really important so that you can get a vanity URL that’s easy to remember as opposed to the long string of characters Facebook will initially assign to your page. Go to https://www.facebook.com/username/ and select a name. For example, we’re at www.facebook.com/kinesisinc.com

4) Update your page regularly. I recommend that our clients update their Facebook page at least 3 times each week. Yes, you can promote your business, but I also encourage you to share news about your company and your staff, give industry news updates, testimonials, tips and share links from other Facebook business pages in your local community. Spend 10 minutes to brainstorm as many post ideas as you can in 10-15 minutes. Use these until you run out – it should last you several weeks) and then repeat the process.

5) Like other Facebook business pages and participate: Go to the business pages of your vendors, clients, past clients, and referrers and “Like” their page (see video below for How-To). Then make sure to look at your Home News Feed to see what’s happening with them and comment regularly. Your comments as a page will include a link back to your home page so you can generate new fans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

6) Offer special Facebook deals: As a professional services firm, I know this won’t work for some companies, but if you can offer specials to your Facebook fans this is a great incentive to get people to Like you.

7) Promote in your office. Create small cards  that you hand out to people encouraging them to “Like” you on Facebook. If you offer specials, mention that on the card. If you don’t offer deals, then another incentive for people to “Like” you is to give useful tips. For example, we provide ongoing marketing and social media tips for people.

8 ) Incorporate photos and videos. Create various photo albums as part of your Facebook page. You can showcase your office and team members. Another great photo opportunity are the community events that you participate in. Dole out the photos slowly since people can only see 3 at a time as part of their Feed. Upload a few each week. If you have videos, these can also be a great draw for your page.

9) Engage people in conversation. One of your goals should be to get people to comment on your posts and hit the small thumbs-up button. The reason you want to involve your fans (besides nurturing the relationship) is that every time someone interacts with your post, it shows up on their feed. This means that your page is exposed to all of their Facebook friends at absolutely no cost to you. Pretty cool, eh?

Here’s a great article about customer engagement and what it really means: Are We Killing Our Customers With Too Much Engagement? And here’s the key point: “Customers…want to engage with content that amuses, teaches, or inspires them.” And they want to look good online – we all do, right? So create ways to help your customer share their knowledge, their company, their intelligence, their good looks, or whatever might be important to them.

10) Advertise. Facebook advertising is cheap and very targeted. You can quickly grow your Facebook fan base with people who have the demographics you are looking for in your prospects.

So, I hope these tips help your company go out and kick some Facebook booty! Once you’ve begun implementing these ideas, check back in and let us know how it’s going.

Don’t do it!

Compelling blog posts require you to hold back the reins a bit on your passion. Most people want to read articles that are lively, tight, clear, and short. In addition, they should be optimized for search engines using key words and phrases.

(I will do many of the things in this blog post that I mention. So, notice how I weave in these tips.)

Tips to Write Better Blog Posts for Your Business

Here are my basic tips to help you write better business blog posts:

• Forget most of English 101: Write in the way that people speak to each other. Start sentences with “and” or “but.” Don’t be afraid to break grammatical rules if it makes your writing more interesting. Like one-word sentences and expressions. Jeez.
• Be concise: Use short declarative sentences. Write paragraphs that are 1-3 sentences. Simple sentence structure is best.
• Scanability: Make your posts easy to scan for information. Use subheadings, bullets, and bold text for emphasis.
• Add value, always: Before you hit publish, ask yourself “Am I adding value to my clients and other readers?”
• Calls to action: You took the time to write the post, make sure the darn thing is working for you. Add a call to action at the end. If you want people to comment, then ask your readers a question or for their feedback. You could also ask people to Like your Facebook page, Follow you on Twitter, Sign up for your e-newsletter, subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, or call you for a consultation.
• Link to your internal pages: This is a great practice and you should do it at least a couple of times in every blog post. It drives your readers into your site to learn more. Search engines follow links too.
• Occasionally link to external pages: Some of your readers will want to learn more. Link to the original source, especially if you are referencing a publication, newspaper, bios, blog, or other information resource.
• Write less. Aim at keeping your blog posts between 250-300 words. Go to 500 if you must, but try to keep it short.
• Create compelling blog post titles: Try to write blog post titles that include a key word or phrase and describe the things that people want to learn about your business and services. Ex: “How to Save Taxes,” “Why Writing for People Works for Search Engines,” “Five Ways to Save Money with Coupons.” If you want to learn more about SEO copywriting, here is a great free resource: SEO Copywriting Made Simple.
• Keep it light: You don’t want to get into in-depth discussions of the nuances of your services. That’s why people call you. Give them the overview and invite them to call you to learn more.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously: One of the most amazing things about blogging is its ability to develop relationships with your readers. So, be friendly and approachable. No pompous people need apply.
• Voice opinions: Don’t be bland. If you have an opinion, then express it. Feel free to be a contrarian (and link to the article or source that you are contradicting). This makes for great reading.

So, these are my top tips for great business blogging posts.

Do you have any of your own to add? Write them in the comments section below.

Every day, we work with clients who offer a professional service like accounting or healthcare. And, while I am advocate of social media, I have to say it’s much harder to see the return on your investment of time and energy on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets when you aren’t selling a widget to a consumer.

That said, there is gold there – you just have to dig a little deeper. Let’s look at the reasons I’ve come to this conclusion and how a Facebook page can help your company:

1. Your FB Fan page establishes another outpost on the web for your company
Your Fan page is a place where prospects, customers, employees, vendors, management and the media can find information out about your products and services. These pages are indexed by the search engines and are public-facing by default – this means that people can find you even if they aren’t logged in to Facebook. With more than 500 million active users, it’s a place your business should be just to keep up with the competition. And even if you are marketing B2B, with that many folks on Facebook – there’s a really good chance your target audience is using it too.

2. Improved SEO and increased traffic
Google has added a new Social Search function. This indexes content on sites like Facebook. So your Fan page content has the potential to improve your search engine ranking and increase the number of ways people can find you. You can capture people on Facebook who are interested in your services, but may not have heard of your company. They follow your links to your website.

3. Connects management and staff directly to customers and fans – easily and free.
By engaging regularly with your Facebook Fans, you increase their loyalty and their advocacy. They are more likely to spread the word about your services because you are staying on their radar – your updates appear in their Facebook News Feed.

Your branded FB page allows people to share your videos and photos, ask and answer questions, and interact with your company and each other. And you have a direct pipeline to your customers. You can send messages to them all at once or target people by location or other demographics – for free.

4. Provide better customer service
You can deepen your relationships with your customers by connecting with them in a social way. And if they have specific questions or feedback, you can talk to them immediately. This provides HUGE value to your audience. You can keep them updated with tips, strategies, industry news, latest research, and so on.

Everytime you update your Facebook page, think: How can I best add value to my clients and Facebook Fans? What do they really want to know? For example, a medical practice may be adding a new technology or an accounting firm may want to let Fans know about important tax filing deadlines.

5. Get ROI-related metrics about your Fans
Facebook’s Page Insights tools and dashboard facilitate the analysis of your marketing and communication by revealing data related to interactions (Comments, Wall posts, and “Likes”); discussed posts, reviews, and mentions; Fan demographics (gender, ages, geographic location/distribution); and so on. These tools improve your ability to identify and target specific demographics and gauge ROI.

This should get you started thinking in the right direction about how to add value to your community using Facebook. I’ll write several more posts to help you with your Business Fan page in the next week or so.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback in the comments section below.

How to Build Followers on Twitter

1. Start with your organization — follow co-workers: If you have other people you know in your organization who are using Twitter, start by following them. They’ll follow you back, and the people who follow them are likely to start following you as well.
2. Follow colleagues, clients, vendors, and like competitors: This is similar to the first strategy. It just widens your net a bit. Follow other people you know who are on Twitter including clients, colleagues, and vendors. When you go to events, ask people if they are on Twitter and if they are, make it a point to follow them.
3. Post regularly: You want to get in the habit of Tweeting regularly. Hop on your account for 3 minutes in the morning and 3 minutes in the afternoon and shoot out a couple of Tweets each time. You want people to know that you are an active participant. People are more likely to follow you if you are a super-Tweeter. You can also use tools like TweetDeck and HootSuite to pre-schedule Tweets. For example, if you are posting to your blog tomorrow, schedule a couple of Tweets to promote your latest post.
4. ReTweet often and liberally: People like to be noticed. When one of the people you are following Tweets something interesting, take a second an Retweet it. This shares the good and makes it more likely that someone with more followers than you will Retweet you. When they do this, all of their followers will see your Tweet and some of them will probably follow you.
5. Help, help, help: If you see folks on Twitter who are asking questions about your industry, then by all means Tweet them an answer. You can reply to someone directly by putting the at sign in front of their Twitter handle. For example, if you wanted to Tweet something to us we are at @kinesisinc. One place you can go to look up keywords is the Twitter Search. Click on the Advanced link to get even more options. If I wanted to look for a potential client asking questions, I could enter the search term “marketing” and scan to see if anyone is asking questions about my area of expertise. When I answer them, they are likely to follow me.
6. Thank people: If someone helps you out on Twitter (or outside of Twitter), acknowledge them on Twitter. People like to follow gracious people.
7. Participate in #followfriday: When you put a # next to a word, it’s called a hashtag. You can use the Twitter Search function and look up words by hashtag. Go there now and look up #followfriday. You’ll see lots of lists of Twitter handles. Every Friday, people on Twitter post the handles of people they think are interesting. So, you can do the same thing! On Fridays, take the time to post a list along with the hashtag #followfriday or #ff. These people are likely to recognize you at some point in the future and when they do, Voila! You get more followers.
8. Incorporate your Twitter handle into other materials: Put your Twitter handle on your business card, Facebook page, and other places where you promote your business.
9. Follow those who follow those you like to read: A little bit convoluted sounding, but it’s quite simple. Go to the people that you follow and look at their list of followers. Start clicking on their links and follow them. Most people on Twitter will follow you back once you follow them. This is a very easy way to grow your followers quickly. One caveat: don’t follow too many people in one day – stick to 20 people otherwise Twitter will give you a warning.

Following exactly these tips, I’ve grown my personal Twitter account (@wendymaynard) to over 10,000 so I know they work. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and Happy Tweeting! Remember, Twitter is social so BE SOCIAL!

The sexy Isaiah Mustafa and the Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign first appeared during the Super Bowl and immediately became a hit.

According to a recent Oregon Business article, “the Old Spice guy campaign was very successful.  Body wash sales were up 107% year over year as of last month.  The campaign also kick-started a trend that brought more women consumers to the brand, which—clearly from the first “hello ladies”—was the strategy. Since women are more likely to be the shopper for the household, going after the female demographic was a winning approach.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the campaign was its aggressive and creative use of social media sites. And it worked really, really, really well. Here are some of the results from the campaign:

• On day 1 the campaign received almost 6 million views
  (that’s more than Obama’s victory speech)
• On day 2 old spice had 8 of the 11 most popular videos online
• On day 3 the campaign had reached over 20 million views
• After the first week old spice had over 40 million views
• The Old Spice twitter following increased 2700% (probably off a lowish base)
• Facebook fan interaction was up 800%
• OldSpice.com website traffic was up 300%
• The Old Spice YouTube channel became the all time most viewed channel (amazing)
• The campaign increased sales by 27% over 6 months since launching (year on year)
• And in the last month sales were up 107% from the social responses campaign work!!!
• Old spice is now the #1 body wash brand for men.

Read those last 3 bullets. Those are profitable results, folks!

Here is the Weiden + Kennedy case study video with the stats above.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In case you’ve never heard of the NSAC their goal is to be the acknowledged leader in:

• providing accounting, tax and business education uniquely tailored to cooperatives
• providing networking and professional development opportunities for our membership; and
• supporting cooperative business interests in standard setting processes
  enabling our membership to effectively serve cooperatives.

I just love presenting to niche groups like the NSAC; since most folks in the room face similar challenges, we’re able to address topics relevant to large portions of the audience. For this presentation, for example, I added a section on how to use Linked In. While many businesses are interested in the “big players” like Facebook and Twitter (Facebook just topped 400 million users), professional service providers can get tremendous return by leveraging business-centric sites like Linked In. I also discussed how the group could use simple and free resources like Google Alerts to monitor online activity.

As a follow-up, I’m posting a PDF of the presentation as well as the compelling video I shared. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (or better yet, see me on Twitter!)

Thanks again to the NSAC for hosting a great event! If your business or organization is interested in having Kinesis speak at your group, drop me a line at our contact page.

If you’ve never been to the Yakima region (this is “wine country” for the state of Washington) do yourself a favor and see what the community has to offer. Great scenery, fantastic vineyards, and a mix of old and new culture that will entertain even the most skeptical traveler.

What a great crowd! Folks from all sizes of business were in attendance, and there was definitely a diversity of experience and knowledge in using social media.

As a follow-up, I’m posting a PDF of the presentation as well as the compelling video I shared. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (or better yet, see me on Twitter!)

Thanks again to the sponsors: Yakima Valley Visitors and Convention Bureau (John and Kirsten – you and your team are awesome), Greater Yakima Chamber of Commerce, and New Vision.

“What is the ROI of Social Media?

and

“How do I measure the ROI of social media?”

And these are great questions that companies should be asking.

Unfortunately, there is no one answer. While we can certainly obtain some metrics through tools like Twitter Search and Google Analytics, some of social media is simply about building goodwill and nurturing relationships. Like the good old-fashioned golf game and the “Let’s Do Lunch” strategy, people like connecting with people.

That said, to start determining your ROI on social media, you must know your baseline and define your goals. (from Mashable): “As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.”

“Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.”

“Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.”

“Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.”

“The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.”

Erik Qualman of Socialnomics has put together another fabulous video that breaks down the staggering numbers of social media into an absorbent format. (See our post, The Social Media Revolution, for his first video.)

Social Media ROI

Click here to view the embedded video.

Erik writes,

While the video uses familiar nomenclature like ROI, many pieces of social media behave so differently than anything we have ever seen, that I prefer to use “What does or will success look like?” rather than “What’s the ROI?” After all, why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel?  Social media touches every facet of business and it should be viewed more as an extension of good business ethics.  Which, if done properly, will harvest sales down the line.

Social Media ROI Statistics

Here are some key statistics pulled from the ROI of Social Media Video:

1.  Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.

2.  Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.

3.  Vaynerchuk found first hand that $15,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, $7,500 Billboard = 300 new customers, $0 Twitter = 1,800 new customers.

4.  Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers.

5.  Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper.  The estimated investment for this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value.  Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)

6.  BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.

7.  Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter.

8.  Naked Pizza, a New Orleans Pizzeria that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media.  In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.”  And 85% of their new customers were from Twitter.  So, yes, social media does work for small businesses.

9.  Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.  As a result of retweets, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.

10.  Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago.  Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.

11.  Software company Genius.com reports that 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities.

12.  During Barack Obama’s rise to the White House, he garnered 5 million fans on social media and 5.4 million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button.  Most importantly this resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising. An astounding 92% of the donations were in increments of less than $100.

13.  The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center witnessed a 9.5% increase in registrations by using social media.

14.  Web host provider Moonfruit more than recouped its $15,000 social media investment as their Website Traffic soared +300% while correspondingly sales increased +20%.

15.  eBay found that participants in online communities spend 54% more money.

16.  71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It.

Supporting articles:

Lee Oden, “Book Review: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk,” Online Marketing Blog

Jan M. Rosen, “Be It Twittering or Blogging, It’s All About Marketing,” New York Times, 3/11/2009

Jon Swartz,  “More marketers use social networking to reach customers,” USA Today,  8/28/09

Let’s talk about your company’s social media strategy. Small investments in Internet Marketing lead to big ROI (as you can see): 503-922-2289

There are some companies that target seniors and Baby Boomers, but are still resisting an interactive online presence and participating in social media.

They may think, “Well my clients are mostly over 60 so they’re not very tech savvy.” Or, “Social media is for kids. My clients are older – they don’t use that stuff.”

However, this is a misperception. While there are still many Baby Boomers and seniors who are not using the Internet as voraciously as Generation Y, the numbers may surprise you.

Seniors Online

Individuals 65 and older still make up less than 10 percent of the active Internet universe. However, their numbers are on the rise. In the last five years, the number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the growth of women online in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.

The largest percentage increase in Internet use since 2005 has been in the 70-to-75 age group, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The survey found that 45 percent of that age bracket is online, compared with 26 percent in 2005. Researching health information is the third most popular online activity with the most senior age group, after email and online search.

What’s more, many seniors find social networking exciting and enjoy finding online community. They’re creating their own blogs and, more often, connecting with family and friends by joining Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

“Social media are giving seniors a voice, and for a generation that has sometimes felt isolated and overlooked, that’s no small feat,” said Sarah Hoit, chief executive of My Way Village, which designs online social networks for older adults.

The No. 1 online destination for people over 65 in November 2009 was Google Search, with 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player and Facebook were No. 2 and No. 3, with 8.2 million and 7.9 million visitors, respectively. Interestingly, Facebook, which came in at No. 3, ranked No. 45 just a year ago among sites visited by senior citizens.

The trend has caught the attention of senior-living communities that have begun to introduce social media to residents. People who grew up with vacuum-tube radio sets are now learning how to befriend grandchildren and old classmates on Facebook and Classmates.com.

Retirement communities are also launching their own Facebook pages and posting videos on YouTube to appeal to the Boomer children of current or prospective residents. For example, Edgemere Senior Living has a Facebook page. Fan pages like this often include dozens of photos of recent activities at the communities. Visitors to the page can become “fans” and post comments. There are entire social networking sites devoted just to seniors such as the Over 60 Exchange, as well as dedicated website areas of organizations like the AARP that has added a forum called Online Communities.

Baby Boomers Online

Baby Boomers are a much bigger force on the Web. The research group, eMarketer, estimates that in 2009 Internet users ages 45 to 63 make up 28.8% of the total online population, or 57.4 million users.

A new report from Forrester Research also reveals some information that may be different than you thought: More than 60 percent of those in the Baby Boomer generational group actively consume socially created content like blogs, videos, podcasts, and forums. What’s more, the percentage of those participating is on the rise.

In 2007, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media was 46% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63). By 2008, those number increased to 67% and 62%, respectively.

The number of Boomers responding to content posted online, as opposed to just passively consuming it, is also going up. For example, the proportion of older Boomers responding to content doubled from 15% in 2007 to 34% in 2008. According to Forrester, this is now a percentage that’s high enough to target this group with a social application.

Here are some relevant statistics from eMarketer that you should know about the baby boomer generation:

• 74% use the Internet at least once a month
• younger Boomers outnumber older Boomers online 35.3 million to 21.4 million
• more Boomer women are Internet users than Boomer men
• 62% of households headed by someone age 50 or older had annual incomes of $75,000 or more, nearly 5% higher than in 2004
• 68% of Baby Boomer women trust online recommendations and rated information they heard in online conversations as credible

What do all of these numbers mean to you and your company? They mean that even if your target audience is Baby Boomers and/or seniors, you cannot ignore Internet marketing. You must ensure that your Web site is keeping pace with the trends, and that you should have a social media strategy in place including a blog and Facebook page, at the very least. And a Twitter and YouTube presence would also be beneficial to reaching your prospects.