Marketing and all things related

In the social media, Web 2.0 and entrepreneurial arenas, there are few names bigger than Techcrunch right now. With with virtual army of readers (150,000+) and a team of writers, the blog is breaking big stories right and left.

Now, one of TC's former writers, Marshall Kirkpatrick has spilled the beans on how he reads feeds to find the hottest and best info for his posts. There is some great advice in here for anyone else trying to drink from the fire hose that is the blogosphere. 

At the very least, you should check out ZapTxt. Connecting RSS to your phone via IM/SMS seems like a brilliant work around for staying up-to-date without needing to invest in some form of special technology. 

 

 

Mobile marketing is coming. There are simply too many cell phones and they're too core to our lives for marketers to not want to get on them.

But I thought we still had a long way to go to get there.  

However, according to a MarketingVox story this morning, Jupiter Research is predicting otherwise:

A study this month from JupiterResearch found 22 percent of companies advertising online also are doing mobile marketing. Overall, the study predicted, mobile ad spending would more than double - from an anticipated $1.4 billion this year to $2.9 billion in 2011. 

I must admit that I'm fairly dubious that 22% of online advertisers are also doing mobile marketing. Unless you're just talking about the blue-chips. There would seem to be way too many small businesses buying PPC ads to have the mobile marketing percentage be that high.  

There is no debating the fact that Google is the 800-lb. gorilla in the online search space. But as we all spend more time and money online, the race is on to build better personalized recommendation engines. Pandora, Amazon, Netflix, iLike, Findory and others are leading the charge to replace traditional search because of its flaws.

Traditional search doesn't necessarily turn up the best product or the right service. It turns up popular ones (based on inbound links, etc.) or those that have done well SEOing their website. Recommendation systems, on the other hand, help us find things that fit us.

As marketers, we must ask ourselves. If we had to rely solely on our customers recommending our product or service for marketing, how would our busines do? Would it flourish? Or suffer?  

Aaron Wall of SEO Book wrote recently about how the ROI of influencing people (social media, viral efforts, etc.) is becoming more effective than influencing machines (traditional SEO). His point is simply that as search engines become increasingly intelligent and effective at avoiding traditional SEO techniques you will get much lower return on your investment of time/energy/money in that area.

Instead, he proposes, one should participate in what he calls the "active web" of blogs, forums, tagging, social bookmarking, social networking, creating link bait and viral marketing. I think that Aaron might be on to something and so do others.

One of the leading thinkers around marketing with social capital or community marketing is Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency. You might enjoy checking out her "Pinko Marketing" manifesto or the related Pinko Marketing wiki.

A few days ago, I asked if you were a gamer, as in someone who "games the system."

Today, I ran across a detailed example of gaming a system, this time using social media. Niall Kennedy, a "syndication geek" from the Bay Area, wrote a great post entitled The Spam Farms of the Social Web.

In it, he examines how a certain website used digg, purchased links, del.icio.us, Newsvine, Reddit, and a Wordpress blog to drive lots of traffic towards its ads and affiliate links. It really is a brilliant piece of research and a blueprint for how to do it.

By the time you read the post, some of the services will probably have implemented changes to try and stop some of these abuses. But not all of them will because they can't. Eliminating everthing that this "gamer" did would cripple the services.

 

Like most quant jocks, I like online marketing because of how measurable it is. However, it just drives me crazy to know how much data there is out there that I can't see. Thus I love it when I run across a tool that pulls back the curtain on some of that hidden data.

SpyFu does just that on the "secrets" of pay per click (PPC) advertising (i.e. it shows costs, clicks, advertisers and traffic). It is the evolution of a similar service called Googspy and offers 20x as much data. The site is powered by an application called Velocityscape Web Scraper Plus+, which constantly extracts data from search engines, Alexa, Dmoz, and other sources.

SpyFu is incredibly useful for competitive research and I encourage you to head over and check it out. Before you go though I should warn you that it is pretty addictive. 

 

Last Friday, I was chatting with Jeff Cram of iSite Design about designing websites with web analytics in mind.

One of the subjects that came up was the challenges that rich media (Ajax, etc.) and RSS are creating to how we traditionally measure website usage. Rich media poses a problem due to the traditional obsession with page views and CPMs. RSS offers a different problem because it pushes your content beyond your control.

There are some companies starting to tackle this challenge from large players like WebSideStory and Feedburner to smaller (and recently acquired players) like MeasureMap and BlogBeat.

Given the large vested interest that both publishers (who make their money through web advertising) and advertisers (who buy that advertising to drive their growth) have in this space, I'm sure that these issues won't stay unsolved for long.

YouTube is certainly one of the major success stories of the most recent entrepreneurial boom. They built a $1.65 billion company through viral marketing.

How did they do it?

The secret, according to a recent speech given by Jawed Karim, one of the founders, is that they built the following four aspects into their application:

1) related video recommendations
2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video
3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments
4) an external video player.

The lesson here for any marketers and many a Web 2.0 entrepreneur is that viral marketing works if you're smart, strategic, and lucky.

You can listen to the full speech on, where else, YouTube.

In the time-starved marketing world of today, it is sometimes hard to step back and see the big picture of marketing spending and trends. Online marketing from pay-per-click to social media certainly gets a lot of attention these days but I'm not sure we all realize how big of a shift we're about to witness.

But as this table from Newspaper Association of America shows, online marketing is still only 1/9 the size of annual TV ad spending and only 1/10 the size of annual newspaper ad spending.



There are so many questions that this arouses in my mind.

Can you imagine 5 more Googles, 5 more Yahoos, 5 more...? Who will they be?

What news tools will arise? New measurement techniques?

Can the media of giants of yesterday make the jump to the new world?

Exciting times, my friends, exciting times.

Social media, for all its potential and hype, is still in the early stages of its adoption life cycle within the business world. The adoption rate of blogs with the Fortune 500 is only 8%. Wikis, social networking, podcasts, crowdsourcing, tagging and more are just starting to be explored by companies.

A friend of mine recently asked me about the implications of such a low adoption rate.

My answer is that it is a double-edged sword.

On one hand, the low adoption rate represents a huge growth opportunity for companies in the space.

The flip side is that those same companies have a huge educational challenge in helping potential customers overcome organizational and habitual inertia.

The good news for you is that if you're blogging and reading blogs, you're ahead of the curve. The sad news is that you haven't heard the last utterance of:

"What is a blog?