The iconic Duracell bunny advertisements were originally launched in 1973, a long time before a rival bunny, by Energizer came on the scene. In the UK and Australia, nobody remembers the Energizer bunny now, but in the US it’s the other way around. When Duracell’s trademark ran out, Energizer jumped in and 115 advertisements later, Duracell’s bunny is buried in US advertising history.

A lesson in commercial complacency perhaps, but certainly proof that if you’re not watching your marketing closely, a competitor may jump your bandwagon or you may miss an opportunity to jump on theirs.

This is particularly true for retailers when it comes to bidding on keywords and phrases in the run up to Christmas. Competitor considerations aside, the most popular during the Christmas period are not going to be the same as those for the rest of the year so it pays, literally, to review your keyword strategy.

We saw uplift of over 100% in visitor traffic across all of our online retailing clients, with all the keyword conventions of the rest of the year thrown out of the tinsel framed window. With such a surge in traffic it’s easy to lose focus on conversion rates, which is essentially what the keyword strategy is ratcheting up.

Consider what a 1% increase in conversion rate equates to in revenue and there you have a specific motivation and ROI figure to work with. In the New Year, the game changes again, in fact a keyword strategy should really just roll on continuously, like the Duracell bunny, or the Energiser one if you’re in the US.

So if I’ve got this right, Royal Mail workers, in the teeth of a recession, in an industry with increasing competition and in the run up to a critical trading period for its fast disappearing customers, is going on strike, again.

The last time, all of two years ago, Royal Mail lost an £8 million contract to deliver second class parcels for Amazon, it’s second biggest customer and this time round, it’s been reported that it’s moved the £25 million main contract to arch rivals Home Delivery Network.

Even in a recession, e-commerce sales are estimated to top £5bn this year and it can’t be too hard a leap for the CWU to understand that retailers will move to protect themselves and their customers from the Royal Mail’s action.

According to industry body, IMRG, prior to the strike, 86% used Royal Mail for at least some of their deliveries but 60% have now made alternative arrangements. IMRG’s Director of Operations, David Smith says of the situation “For Royal Mail the impact of this industrial action is going to be disastrous”.

Anecdotally, I know someone who had one item they’d ordered online disappear twice in the Royal Mail. On the third attempt it was finally delivered. Without a strike, the Royal Mail would have to face an uphill struggle holding on to their existing customers, but now, any remaining faith or loyalty must surely have been lost, like many of our parcels.

Word of mouth marketing has been the stock in trade of local builders since, well, probably since anyone started building anything.

Inevitably you end up asking your neighbours who built their extension, and if they’re happy with it, you ask the builder to do the same for you, only maybe slightly bigger.

We’ve been renovating a property recently and went down that time honoured road and our builder is brilliant. They say 70% of people trust in word of mouth compared to just 15% for advertising and with the large sums building works suck up, you need trust and lots of it.

Our builder doesn’t have a website, he doesn’t need one, he’s kind of off-line local social in new media terms but building products, now that’s another business. You might ask your neighbour where they got their materials from but you’ll certainly shop around to find the best price.

And so we arrived on the Wickes website looking for a new front door. New front doors are important and they can cost a lot and frankly Wickes, isn’t the first place we’d look. But through the magic that is Google we arrived at some handsome traditional doors, more expensive than you’d expect to see at Wickes but extremely good value compared to door specialist’s prices.

The doors came with customer reviews, which were all very favourable which made up for the absence of a reputation for good front doors, we suspected we might be getting a bargain and bought. And we weren’t disappointed.

The moral for brands on the web is if you’re confident enough in your products and services to allow customer reviews you can actually widen your product offering and sell things your brand is not traditionally known for.

Trendstream’s recent research evidenced what we’d long suspected – that one of the best ways of improving brand image is to interact with customers online. And not by a small degree either – a 29% increase in reputation on average.

Flip this round and it’s easy to understand the effect failing to interact well with customers online. Example, I’m in the market for a new boiler. Valliant and Worcester Bosch are the two makes I’m looking at. The Valliant website looks slicker but runs you into the equivalent of a road block. It’s smooth sailing on a nice looking site all the way up to boiler recommendations and then you can’t click on them to get more information, or phone them. The Worcester Bosch site by contrast, while lacking in design, functions well and gives you the information you need including a good phone service.

So when it comes down to making a decision between them, I’m going to go for the Bosch, even though it costs around 20% more, because the brand experience online makes me trust it more over the long term.

Incidentally, it’s not just boiler makers that need to be aware of online brand perception. We asked a plumber to recommend a boiler and when we looked up the brand he mentioned, it had a poor reputation but was known for giving the largest commission to plumbers. Needless to say this had a negative effect on our perception of that plumber’s brand value.

There’s really no excuse for badly designed websites online these days as there’s a raft of inexpensive tools available to test where the roadblocks are in the customer journey. Two tried and tested ones are Kampyle which makes it easy to ask visitors what they think about the site and Crazyegg which shows you where they are clicking with a ‘confetti’ map, so you can move important text up to that area.

It’s easy to end up snowed under with website analytics data so keeping it simple enables online businesses to make big improvements to customer journeys quickly and easily.

Online monitoring is now firmly on many brands’ radar but opinions on how it should be implemented remain divided. Take for example, The Mail’s decision to stop moderating its forum recently; NMA’s readers are almost equally split (52%/48%) on whether this is a good or bad thing.

The confusion continues when it comes to which department is meant to handle it. While marketing can push from a brand and SEO perspective they aren’t geared up to handle the negative comments coming the other way from disgruntled customers. Equally we wouldn’t want to leave it to IT to deal with it as happened in the early days of the web.

One solution adopted by NTL recently was to task their telephone customer service team to spend an element of their time trawling for newly posted complaints online and responding to them. This makes a lot of sense – they have the skill, they have the resource and with more complaints moving online, it transfers their efforts to an area that needs it.

Whether they’re uncovering all the complaints this way though is up for debate. Some suppliers have sprung up specialising in this area but it’s hard to see how their software improves on established search engines. Some talk of ‘deep search’ but is ‘deep’ going to throw up the most important results brands would be most keen to deal with?

Free help is at hand from Google who quietly added some very useful buttons to web results pages enabling anyone to search specifically in forums, reviews or videos – something that would have come in very handy for a company like Domino Pizza recently.

Doing online monitoring well is, like many emerging areas of online marketing, an exercise in applied common sense and web know how. With no proven path to follow, brands must largely make their own way or take advice from an agency the required mix of expertise.

While The Mail has decided they can live without consistent monitoring on their forum, it is at least a considered position. The main risk for other online entities is not having a position at all and no clear strategy for coping with damaging brand comments inevitably coming their way.