I've been talking today with a company about expanding its use of social networking. They are a Newcastle based music retailer who are interested in creating an online community where customers, their staff and the makers of their products can get together and talk about music, review products, get technical support, hear about events, etc, building a relationship between themselves and their customers. At the end of the day they want to maintain and build their business but the way they want to do this is to by improving their customer experience and put something back into the local music scene.

A mini site is a website by which companies offer information about one specific product or product group often used as part of a SEO campaign or web marketing mix.

Using a mini site you could create a few pages that specialise in a specific product or brand. This could be a new product line or one that needs to promote.

People are more and more using mobile and smart phones to use the internet, especially for emails, social networking, geographic based searches.

Some phones still only have simple text based browsers with very small resolutions but others like the iPhone and other smart phones have sophisticated full browsers even if their resolutions is still small compared to desktop PCs and laptops.

It has been pointed out to you the need to make more use of your social networking sites and the reasons for doing so whether they be for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) reasons or a general part of your e-marketing strategies. The sticking point to making this worthwhile and effective though is building a decent sized friend/follower base.

To be done right, SEO needs to be planned carefully and be methodical. Often companies will apply educated guesswork in the absence of real data. All though the answers may seem like common sense often what you perceive differs widely from the truth.

Analysis is the key and analytics of some sort needs to be available to all staff involved in this aspect of work.

SEO isn't rocket science and the majority of the information you need can be found throughout the web. However, I keep getting asked "What is search engine optimisation?" or "What are the SEO tricks?". I decided to write these guitdelines and as broad outline of the SEO techniques involved.

Following on from the article on market research, this text gives an example of the kind of survey that could be taken the gather information from your customer. This information can be used when formulating your e-marketing strategies to make sure they are focused.

The questionairre is based on the requirements of a fictitious musicial instrument retailer, The Company, looking to expand its e-marketing campaigns.

You

1. Sex

2. Age

3. Location

4.

Before undertaking any marketing activities, in this case E-Marketing, you need to step back a bit and find out who your customers are and what they would like from you and also find out what your competitors are doing. The only way to do this is through market research. By researching your market thoroughly, you can avoid wasting time or money on promotion or marketing activities that may have little effect.

What browser does our average customer use? Does he browse on his phone or a big desktop PC back at home? How old is he? How much does he earn?