I watched the news this Thanksgiving weekend and it was both horrifying and fascinating. The horrific news involved a Wal-Mart employee on Long Island who was trampled to death by oblivious Black Friday shoppers who broke down the door to get into the store and the reported bargains.

The fascinating part? All the media counting down to what was presumed to be the worse holiday season for retailers in over 20 years. Did the media create a self-fulfilling prophecy that whipped people into this frenzy?

It left me wondering how life got this far out of control.

What kind of financial pressures could these folks be feeling to even want to stand outside all night long waiting for some impersonal Big Box retailer to open their doors at 5 am? What kind of stress is so crushing that you are oblivious to another human being trampled to death as you walk over him on your way to a bargain?

So, I started thinking about the less hyped holidays that I knew as a young child in Ohio. I recalled how I saved money all year long in my “Christmas Club” at my community bank. How I looked forward to cashing that check and going shopping. And what a delightful and civilized experience it was. Now we are in the age of instant everything — including instant banking in a world without Christmas Clubs (at least that I know of).

Banking these days involves a growing slew of online banking services, including my favorite – remote deposits. Instant information, instant access and instant gratification is now moving into community banking as well as the big guys who see remote deposit banking as an entre into local communities. Will the local community banks survive?

Will local banks be able to fight off Big Box Banking? Will they help us to retain our sense of community, caring and civility that was so lacking at the Long Island Wal-Mart? In some way they seem emblematic of local communities’ fights to retain their identity and values.

As a web strategist and marketer I don’t see many local banks taking advantage of online marketing to help them grow deposits and retain existing customers in the face of Big Box competition – and it makes me nervous. I think we need them as much as they need us.

A Pew Internet & American Life project showed that fully 53% of the U.S. Adult Internet users (39% of the entire adult population) were banking online by September 2007. Local banks seems to be offering a growing array of online banking services, yet I do not observe a commensurate increase in the use of highly effective online marketing tactics.

How then will community banks be able to maintain a competitive edge over Big Box Banks if the big guys offer the same services that local banks offer online AND they are more effective in using web marketing to take local customers away?

Local Banks — Time to Wake Up. The fabric of our community needs you. And you need you to become more sophisticated at web marketing to remain competitive.

It happened again. I heard from yet another client about how a “Blue Bird” (aka unexpected sale) happened via their website. What’s so unusual about that – after all isn’t that what a website is supposed to do?

The unusual part is what happened to the visitor after they got to the website. And, I should hasten to add that it usually happened over several visits to the site.

What happened is they started to ‘go steady’ with the company; except the company was not aware of it. They started to assign attributes of a relationship to the business such that by they time they finally engaged and connected to them there was a bond already established in their mind.

So, I keep getting reports from clients that usually start out with some variation on “an interesting thing happened…” and then they tell me about their new customer and how incredibly easy it was to land them. In fact, some of them actually felt like their customer landed them!

What’s happening?

In all instances someone came to their site and found generous, relevant, useful information. So useful, that they kept coming back. The information was part of a web strategy to use content to increase their presence in search engines, build relevant traffic to the site, and keep people engaged when they arrived.

Because the information that they valued was also written by an identified person, they developed some level of trust and a cyber-relationship with the author of the material (in most cases the author was listed as the CEO or other senior executive).

What’s more, it didn’t seem to matter how they got to the site – in some instances it was because they read content that the author published elsewhere online that then drove them into the site. In other cases, it was through a search engine. The channel was interesting but not necessarily relevant to what then occurred.

What occurred was an upending of their normal sales process. New customer acquisition that used to take weeks or even months was happening right away – sometimes immediately.

The customer was pulled into them instead of the company pushing their message out and then having to spend time building the necessary credentials and trust to even get close to the final round of consideration. The prospect (soon to become customer) already trusted them and assigned a level of competence to them; they were fans.

Another important caveat: I do not work with super-large companies. Most of my clients are fast-growing small/mid-size businesses. They do not carry the baggage of a large, impersonal brand and so it is probably a lot easier for this to happen.

The unexpected consequence was this incredible cyber-relationship that transcended normal behavior and produced such powerful results for them in far less time than normal with significantly less effort.

Can we depend on this for steady-state online marketing? I don’t think so – but it sure beats all when it happens.

We’ve been taking an increasing number of calls over the past few months on a rather interesting topic: reputation management. To be more precise: online reputation management.

As it turns out, nothing can kill your prospects for fast growth much quicker than a few unkind words posted by an alienated employee, “wronged” customer, devious competitor or malicious prankster. (Speaking of which, isn’t there a special place in Hell for those pranksters who do nothing but destroy?)

Why is that?

Because of the multiplicative effect, ease and anonymity of online communication. What’s more, if the comments are in high traffic interactive communities like the growing army of social media sites, they can spread like wildfire and be very hard to put out once the fire is raging.

Putting the fire out before it gets out of control is usually not what goes on, however. Most companies and executives don’t have any level of online reputation monitoring. They simply don’t know until random events make them aware of the problem – or some Good Samaritan.

So, now companies that were previously doing a full-court press for growth all of sudden have a new, very ugly problem that sucks up their precious time and energy. The funny thing is most of the cases I know about were also unjustified.

Even if everything is humming along in a positive vein there is worthwhile intelligence to mine out of the mentions your company, products/services and key executives get online. Intelligence you can use to strengthen your business.

Yet, one simple thing that a company can do will help you identify the problem and enable you to take corrective measures before it gets out of control: monitor your online reputation. Most businesses are not monitoring their reputation online - and that is a big mistake.

Put in place an online reputation monitoring system. Those systems can range from free Do-It-Yourself systems to sophisticated highly automated monitoring programs offered by a growing army of companies.

Do yourself a favor – go to Google Alerts now, set up an account (it’s free) and put some keyword phrases into their monitoring system. Use keyword phrases like your company name, products/services, and top executives. Set the frequency for delivery of the results and take time to read them.

That’s at least a start to getting your new online reputation protection program underway.