Customers don't buy products. You read that right. Before you click away thinking I've finally given up on life and gone ga-ga, think about it for a moment. Customers don't buy products - they buy the means of achieving a personal goal. That means your business isn't really the product you are selling, but the goal others are achieving.

I, along with many others, have been shouting the customer engagement mantra for a while now as online business continues to evolve. The upswing in social networking use, greater transparency through word of mouth and the ability for consumers to find virtually any information quickly and easily has meant businesses have had to begin communicating more openly with consumers if they wish to stave off negative publicity. Google's new Sidewiki project, recently launched in Beta, has removed any last doubt (official Google post). Sidewiki is potentially the biggest development in word of mouth marketing since instant messaging started, and a failure to take it seriously could be very costly indeed for some businesses. Sidewiki gives everyone the ability to leave comments - positive or negative - against every single webpage. Including yours.

Are you blindly cutting back your marketing in the recession? Not finding your old strategies as effective? Aaron Darc explores the changing psychology of the consumer and how marketing techniques must change with it.

Search Engine Optimisation, articles on usability, optimising for websites Sydney. This is an example of writing content purely with Search Engine Optimisation in mind. Sure, the text will be picked up by search engines but so what? It provides nothing useful to the reader and eventually will lose any ranking advantage it gains when no one navigates to your website and provides you with the ultimate online testimonial: a link back to your site. More importantly, you are wasting valuable time and resources attempting to exploit the system.