Interactive Marketing Blog

According to Comscore, the global source for digital market intelligence, Microsoft’s bing made a slight gain in market share in the rapidly growing search marketplace.

Bing increased from a 8% share to 9.3% of global monhtly searches. Yahoo continues to maintain it’s distant second place ranking with 19% market share trailing the search marketing industry leader Google which owns 64% of the search engine marketing share.

Search engine marketing recently passed 100 Billion searches globally, therefore the 3 market leaders continue to strive and make grounds for market share. Microsoft recently has invested $100 Million in advertising campaigns promoting bing and Yahoo is set to release a new advertising campaign at Advertising Week which will focus on the Yahoo Search Marketing platform.

Many online and interactive marketing professionals believe search engine marketing Pay Per Click Search Ads and Search Engine Optimization SEO continues to offer the greatest ROI in the digital and interactive marketing landscape.

What is your favorite search engine? and why? Would love to see your comments here…..

Following leaked revelations Twitter will take in as much as $20 million or so per month by the fourth quarter of 2010, it appears the company is testing a new contextual advertising system that will target ads to people based upon the contents of their tweets.

Saul Hansell of the New York Times tweeted yesterday he’s apparently in on the test and will have more to report at a later date.

Inline contextual advertising on Twitter might not be such a bad thing. If it’s relevant. If it’s not too frequent. And if it actually serves a person’s needs. Time and testing will address that but one thing is clear. Either through fees, ad revenue or some other source, Twitter does need to start making money. Even the best services can’t live on VC money indefinitely.

Twitter, of course, states all this leaked information is inaccurate and unofficial. But, there may be a reality TV show in the works called Final Tweet. Seriously. That has to be a joke.

This article was posted from AdRants.

Matthew Robson, 15, recently finished an internship at Morgan Stanley where he was tasked with explaining teenage media consumption.  He explained that he was only relaying the daily conversations of the 200 teenagers in his year and thousands of others across the country, translated into language that bankers would understand.

Today he is the talk of Tokyo, Wall Street and the City. Fund managers, CEOs and analysts are poring over his report, How Teenagers Consume Media, which he wrote last week while on work experience at Morgan Stanley.

In it he laid out the world according to the teenager: a confusing place where the PC is a radio, the games console is a telephone, the mobile telephone is a stereo and text-message machine, the DVDs are pirate copies and no one uses Twitter.

Teenagers do not listen to the radio, he wrote, preferring online streaming sites, nor do they ever buy music. Games consoles “now… connect to the internet, voice chat is possible between users… one can speak for free over the console so a teenager would be unwilling to use a phone,” he wrote.

He told The Times that at home he usually communicates with his male friends while blowing up terrorists on the action game Call of Duty. “You use a mobile phone if you want to talk to girls,” he said, as “only about one in fifty girls plays computer games.”

Girls are a lot more prone to spend their time on social networking sites. Matthew uses Facebook but his accounts with Piczo and Bebo have lapsed and Twitter is strictly for the elderly. “It’s aimed at adults,” he said. “Stephen Fry is not particularly cool. Also, for the cost of one tweet you could send quite a few text messages.” As no teenagers followed each other’s profiles, tweeting was “pointless”.

He believes cost is a critical factor in the teenage market as “no one has any money”. “Eight out of ten teenagers don’t buy music,” he said. “It comes from limewire, blogs or torrents.” Meanwhile, pirated DVDs generally cost £2 and go on sale even as the films are in the cinema.

The entire article can be found on TimesOnline.

Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21 percent of all marketing dollars spent in 2014 as advertisers shift money away from traditional media to search marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, social media and mobile promotions, according to a recent study.

The trend is already underway, as more marketers this year are taking money from traditional marketing budgets and using it in interactive advertising, as opposed to supporting interactive efforts with new funding, as was the case in years past, according to the Forrester Research report “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014,” by Shar VanBoskirk.

The above chart represents the interactive marketing spend forecast through year 2014. 

• Search Marketing will continue to lead the lion’s share of interactive spend growing from an estimated $15 Billion in 2009 to in excess of $31 Billion in 2014.
• Display Advertising comes in second behind search and will increase from just under $8 Billion in 2009 to $17 Billion in 2014.
• Email Marketing will double from $1.2 Billion, and
• Social Media and Mobile Marketing which are realizing the fastest growth percentage wise will total in excess of $4 Billion in 2014.

You can read the full article on internetnews.com.

Google to Target Users by Fico Score
Google has teamed with Compete and plans to experiment with targeting online ads to consumers based on high Fico Scores.  The ads which will be available on the Google Content Network will primarily focus on financial offerings like credit cards and other high end luxury products.  You can read the complete article here at MediaBuyerPlanner.

Google Takes the Battle to Microsoft
Google is taking the battle to Microsoft’s backyard with the recent announcement of Google Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system designed to initially run on netbooks and later be available to the open source community.

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.  You can read the complete article here at googleblog.blogspot.com.

The Growing Power of Mommy Bloggers
Last week, one of my associates and rising public relations star, Kim Jaimeson gave our internal agency staff a presentation on the power of Mommy Bloggers.  I came across this article and it sparked me to mention some startling statistics related to the power and growth in this emerging buying group.

Mommies are flocking to social networks, according to new research from BabyCenter LLC, which runs several parenting Web and community sites.

The number of moms using social media regularly has grown from 11% in 2006 to 63% today, an increase of 462% in three years, the company said.

Social media are not equal in online mommies’ eyes, however. Most say they use mass-reach networks such as Facebook for socializing and entertainment, but turn to specialized content sites for information and counsel from fellow parents.  You can read the full article by visiting Promo Magazine.

Improving Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Clicks and Conversions
I do a fair amount of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and trying to keep up with white hat methods and practices is like sometimes drinking water from a firehose.  Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing consistently update and change their algorithms therefore keeping search engine optimization rankings as a dynamic practice.

Recently, I came across this webinar on Marketing Expirements, which I think does an outstanding job of explaining white hat tips and strategy to effectively building sites and landing pages optimized for search engines and better conversions.

Humorous Web 2.0 Viral Video
One of my distinguished colleagues, Mark Newsome, Sr. Vice President of Client Services shared this web site story musical video with myself and others today.  While I self proclaim to honing absolutely zero ability when it comes to musical talent, I thought this was a very funny and viral video and wanted to share it with you and my vastly growing audience of 40,000 unique visitors (actually 4 visitors according to Google Analytics a few moments ago), but hey, an Interactive Marketing Blogger has to start somewhere right?  Can only go up from here.

This past Saturday, I initially begrudgily attended the ConvergeSC Conference held in Columbia at the University of South Carolina’s Swearingen Engineering facility.  I certainly could have thought of a hundred better things I would rather spend my Saturday doing than attending an all day conference; however I must admit that my time was well invested.

This conference was rich in content, well organized and offered a wide array of credible speakers.  While some of the things that I learned  were well over my head, such as hadoop, git, ruby, rails, rest, etc, the balance of the topics covered were spread evenly through web marketing strategy, design and technical presentations.

Below I will categorize the speakers by topics and reference some examples that were used in their presentations:

Design Presentations

Jason Beaird of Cyberwoven – Design 4 Developers.
Jason presented on good use of textures, typography and fonts for the web.  Textures have the ability to make a website sort of pop and not look so much like a website.  Typography is important in web design and there are only 9 standard fonts that are used across the web; however many web developers have been using (sIFR) Scalable Inman Flash Replacement.

(sIFR) is a combination of Javascript and Flash where developers can choose the font of their choice and render it as a text element in html.  (sIFR) is not designed to use fonts in body copy because of demands of computer processing; however it can be used in titles or in areas to display and signal out text.  One drawback is that the end users computer must have that font installed on their computer in order for the (sIFR) to function correctly.

Another font technique that is rapidly gaining presence is the use of Cufon.  This is a text replacement technique that uses canvas and vml eliminating the need of Flash rendering.

Here are some sites that were referenced by Jason:

designbygrid.com
960.gs
modexcms.com
webgrapes.it
blueacorn.com

Matthew Smith of Squared Eye - Simple Steps From Decent to Great Web Design

Matt touched on designing in the grid system as well and how to use white space effectively, typography and use of complimentary colors in web development.  He has created a site patterntap.com, which demonstrates good use of design across many different web related examples.  Also, here are some sites that he referenced:

inkd.com
simplicitylaw.com
whywewhisper.com

Greg Lunn of Cyberwoven – Cross-Media Workflows with Adobe Creative Suite
Greg dove into Adobe’s CS4 suite and it’s cross platform compatibility and timeliness for more rapid development.  He showcased some features in Bridge as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks and Dreamweaver integration.

Strategy Presentations

Geno Church of Brains on Fire - Creating a Brand Ambassador Movement Online
Geno presented on effective ways to create brand ambassador movements.  He took us through a live case study with Fiskars and the Fiskateer brand ambassador movement.  Fiskars is a 360 year old brand and mostly known for fine hand tools and scissors.  The Fiskateer movement was more than people purchasing scissors, it was about a hobby and passion for creating memories that lasted a lifetime.

Here are some notes and takeaways on Geno’s presentation:
Movements are built on passion.
Movements need inspirational leadership.
To build a supportive community, you need passion, inspiration and leadership to start a conversation and dialogue.
Word of Mouth (WOM) plays a huge role and 90% of WOM handles offline.
Movements make advocates feel like rockstars.

Jessica Cook of ADCO – The Power of Content.
Jessica  presented on the importance of content on the web.  Content is King, Right? Why?  People want answers.  Many times we build websites with good design, yet the content is poor.  For anyone who has worked in web development long enough they’ve gone through a battle with an art director, copywriter or coder.

A good website is rich in content, design and code and all must work hand in hand in the very early stages to build and construct rich meaningful websites that have an impact on their intended audiences.

Mike Mann of Nexsen Pruet - I wrote it; I own it….Don’t I?
Mike discussed the differences in real property, personal property which is tangible and intellectual property which is intangible.  Patent rights are assigned to the inventor but they have to be assigned in writing.  Different companies have varying policies on who maintains rights to IP so developers need to be aware of employment agreements and the details that reside in various legal agreements.

Robert Prioleau of Blue Ion – Elements of Experience
Robert presented on the engagement between a brand and community.  He emphasized “The Story”, there is a story in everything.  You must have a secret narrative and a social agenda.  He referenced the Vietnam Memorial as an example and while it is not a website, it’s design as a monument is emotional in the connection and meaning that it takes on.

Joel Stevenson of the USC Technology Inubator – Starting a Business
Joel discussed with the audience the services provided by the USC Incubator and how it works to strenghten, incubate and grow partipating companies.  When entrepreneurs have a business idea, the most important thing they can do is create a “Business Plan”.  This plan should be brief yet detailed and effective in presenting to potential investors or financial institutions.  The most important elements of the business plan are:
1. Who are you? What do you do?
2. Who is your management team and what experience do they bring to the table?
3. Most importantly, how will you get people to pay you for your idea, how are you going to make money?

Less is more, the plan needs to be read and understood in less than a 5 minute time frame.

Robyn Tippins of Yahoo – Marketing Socially
Robyn discussed many important topics in how to market socially from the use of viral campaigns like Mafia Wars and MorphMonkey on Facebook to gaming, as well as one to one marketing and traditional awareness and public relations.

She mentioned the success of MorphMonkey on raising awareness for std’s amongst a younger audience as well as Target’s effective use of My Weekly Ad Deals in keeping consumers engaged and increasing conversions.

Technical Presentations

Jason Dew of Catamorphic Labs – Ruby on Rails: Opionated Development
This is where I first started getting lost at the conference.  Jason Dew of Catamorphic Labs presented and demonstrated developing on the Ruby on Rails framework.

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby.  Twitter is built on the Ruby on Rails platform.  Ruby allows web developers to generate applications rapidly and efficiently via the use of modules which generate code and sql for backend database connectivity.  Ruby on Rails can significantly speed up the development process.

Chris Eargle of SC Farm Bureau Insurance - REST
Chris demonstrated how REST, Representational State Transfer functions.  The Web is built off of REST functionality and architecture.  Systems that use the REST principle are considered to be RESTful.
What all that means – I have absolutely no idea.  You can check it out by clicking on the REST link and reading and researching for yourself because the content is wayyyyyyyy over my head.

Mark Gunnels of Catamorphic Labs – MapReduce in the Cloud
Mark presented on Hadoop and it’s ability to mine mass amounts of data.  One might wonder what the heck is Hadoop?  It is a Java based framework that supports data intensive distributed applications.  It allows applications to work with thousands of computers and petabytes (1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1000⁵ or 10¹⁵ bytes of data) That’s a lot of data!

Hadoop was founded by Doug Cutting who named the application after his son’s stuffed elephant.  He now works for Yahoo who uses the framework in their search and advertising business.

Mark referenced how the NY Times used Hadoop to convert 4 Terabytes of data (11 million articles) into PDF documents in less than 24 hours.
Jonathan LeBlanc of Yahoo – Yahoo! Developer Network
Jonathan offered insite into integrating with the Yahoo Developer Network.  He took the group through using live demos of retrievr, which is a flickr app and also dove into how to use yahoo query languarge (yql) with mapping and geographic based tools.

Jonathan stressed that many of the advantages of integrating and using apps with Yahoo is that you utilize their massive serving and computing power to process applications as well as the credibility of working with one of the largest internet properties in the world.