Archive for June 2nd, 2009

Quick: How many members does Facebook have ?

June 2, 2009

Ken’s Take: I finally joined one of the social networking sites -– mostly to see pictures of my granddaughter.  I wouldn’t describe myself as hooked – but my interest in the social networking phenomenon is elevated -– so, I’ve been doing some digging.  Here’s the first post.

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Excerpted from AudioTech Trends, May 2009

Some stats: 

Facebook  has 125 million members worldwide. 

On a typical day, MySpace adds 250,000 members, and draws 4.5 billion page views.

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. 

News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million. 

Microsoft purchased just 1.6 percent of Facebook for $240 million.

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Social networking sites usually fall into one of five categories: 

The egocentric sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, allow a user to create a profile and develop a network of friends.  They are also a medium for creating a new identity — or multiple identities — and for the publication of songs, videos, photographs, writing, or other artistic expression.

Community-based networks bring together people of the same race, religion, or nation.  They tend to mirror real-world communities. BlackPlanet, for example, is a site for African Americans. 

Opportunistic social sites, such as LinkedIn, attract members who want to leverage the Web for business reasons, such as people looking for work, managers seeking job candidates, or free-lance consultants looking for clients.

Passion-centric networks are organized around a hobby or pursuits of some sort, such as people who like dogs or restore antique cars.  Almost any hobby or specialty can spawn such a site.

Media-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, exist so that people can share videos and photos.  They are more about the content than about interaction.

Source article:
http://www.trends-magazine.com/trend.php/Trend/1914/Category/42

Posted in Internet - Soc Networking | Leave a Comment »

Fewer people really listen to hip-hop … surprised ?

June 2, 2009

Excerpted from DickMorris.com, “Obama’s War on Talk Radio”, May 25, 2009

The newest data from Arbitron, the company charged with measuring the size of radio audiences, suggests that listenership to hip hop, inner city, and minority radio has been overstated in the past and that the popularity of conservative talk radio has been under-reported.

This conclusion comes from the company’s decision to dispense with the Stone Age way it has been measuring radio audiences – by hand written diaries based on listener memory – with modern machines which automatically record what the person is listening to and for how long.

Arbitron is the company tasked with rating radio listenership.  The equivalent of the Neilson television ratings, its measurements of audience share are revered like Scripture by station managers, owners, and advertisers.

Traditionally, Arbitron relied on hand written diaries.  Since the diaries were based on memory, they were often faulty.  So Arbitron availed itself of new technology in launching its Portable People Meter (PPM) – a cell phone sized unit the listener wears on his or her belt which automatically notes what station they are tuning in and when they switch or stop.

The PPM measurements concluded that hip hop, urban rock, and minority-oriented radio stations reached fewer listeners and for shorter periods of time than the diaries had indicated.  It found that talk radio had a larger listenership.

What is really at work here is an effort by the FCC to stack the deck to help … minority stations earn higher advertising revenues than those to which their real market share would entitle them. 

New York and New Jersey sued Arbitron alleging discrimination in its choice of the sample charged with wearing the PPMs. 

Now the FCC is launching its own investigation. The FCC’s acting Chairman — Michael J. Copps — announced an investigation of Arbitron’s radio measuring technology called the Portable People Meter.  

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Your cellphone will keep you connected … with companies trying to sell you something.

June 2, 2009

Summary: The jargon is “mobile marketing” — marketers placing ads, coupons, reminders, and links in and around your cellphone apps.  It’s the next wave of innovative marketing and will spread quickly.  Why? Because it seems to work.

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Excerpted from Business Week, “Pandora: Unleashing Mobile Phone Ads: Kraft, Nike, and others are getting results advertising on Pandora’s mobile music service. Is cell-phone marketing finally taking off?” By Tom Lowry, May 21, 2009

It’s just a matter of time until mobile marketing will take off in the U.S.  … for two reasons: Web-surfing smartphones are selling briskly even in a downturn, and applications for those gadgets … are proliferating.

People are spending a lot more time playing games, watching TV, and shopping on their phones. That’s what marketers call engagement, a fancy way of saying people are paying attention. Companies, of course, prize that, so they’re looking for mobile applications that are a good fit for their brands.

Which brings us to Pandora, a nine-year-old, free online service that lets users design “radio stations” based on their musical preferences. Since Pandora launched a mobile edition two years ago, it has signed up 6 million people…That has prompted the likes of Best Buy, Dockers, Target, and Nike to buy ads on Pandora and experiment with what remains a cheap advertising medium

“Marketers, especially consumer brands, have to take mobile seriously now. You have to be where your customer works, lives, and plays.”

Pandora has become a test bed because people who use the service tend to spend a lot of time playing around with it. They are constantly creating stations, rating songs, and scrolling through playlists to find artists they don’t know … on average subscribers use the mobile service about 90 minutes a day (though there are no independent numbers).

Advertisers are trying out Pandora in myriad ways. Sometimes it’s as a direct marketing tool. Domino’s, for example, puts up ads that urge people to call in for a pizza directly from their phones.

Other companies are using coupons. Docker’s offered a 20% discount if visitors went to the brand’s site and entered a promotional code .

Some companies prompt users to watch movie clips where their products are featured prominently.

If one thing has surprised advertisers, it’s how avidly consumers are responding. Target says 27% more people clicked on its ad for the release of Christina Aguilera’s greatest hits CD last fall than on any other mobile Web campaign. The ad urged users to visit a site where they could get a free Aguilera ringtone and buy the album…

Sonos, which sells home music systems, just wrapped up a campaign on Pandora. DeAnna Wassom, Sonos’ senior marketing director, says she has never seen better customer response in her 20 years in the business. The ads asked people to click through to a promotional video. Typically, only 1% to 2% of people click on ads overall. But nearly 5% clicked in this case…and almost 40% of those clicking watched the entire video. During the campaign, nearly twice as many people asked to be put on Sonos’ e-mail list as those signing up on the company’s regular site.

Most brands have no clue how to market on mobile devices. Many try to do too much, including making sites so technologically flashy that they crash phones. The key is to keep it simple … build special mobile sites, because regular ones don’t translate well to supersmall screens.

Edit by TJS

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Full Article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_22/b4133052597112.htm

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Posted in Internet Marketing - eCommerce -, Mobile Marketing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »