Pinterest Demographics

Spoiler alert: female, younger, not particularly affluent. Oh, and a lot of Midwestern gals.

http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-networks/pinterest-demographic-data/

Are You The 1%?

Study: Only 1% of Facebook 'Fans' Engage With Brands

http://adage.com/article/digital/study-1-facebook-fans-engage-brands/232351/

Perception in the Advertising World

What Makes Facebook Users Click?

Hint: Really basic stuff, like asking them to click, humor, breaking news, or posting something scandalous.

From http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/6-tips-to-make-facebook-users-click.html:

Commentary and analysis on breaking news — Readers like this. Three times as many Facebook users like opinion posts as the average post. These types of posts also get twice as many shares as average.
Controversy — No surprise here, given how conflict effectively drives so much of public attention. Drawing attention to "controversial stories on debatable subject matter" can double both likes and shares.
Reader shout-outs — Directly addressing readers can quadruple feedback. Asking for recommendations triples comment.
Strong photos — A strong photo can double likes, shares, and comments.
Humor — People on Facebook like funny. (Think of your own experiences looking at posts.) Get a laugh and your post gets 50 percent more likes than the average post and five times as many shares.
Calls to action — Spend any time in direct marketing and you learn how important a call to action is. So there should be little surprise that adding a question can increase feedback by 64 percent while a call to read or take a closer look increases engagement by 37 percent.

Shit Social Media Pros Say

There's so many of these "shit ________ say" videos by now, why not one more?

Apple and Emerging Markets

Chinese carriers aren't so interested in paying handset subsidies, so they're going with cheaper phones. Srry iPhone, you'll have to continue focusing on upselling The Next Big Thing to the domestic market:


For instance China Unicom’s EBITDA margins for its mobile division have declined sharply in recent years from 42% in 2008 to about 24% expected by the end of 2011, mainly due to high level of subsidies associated with higher priced smartphones. By selling cheaper smartphones, these companies will be able to reduce their subsidy costs while keeping data usage and consequently ARPU levels intact.

And if you always mis-read that carrier's name as China Unicorn, well, you and I would probably get along.


Linky

NBA All-Star...

...E-Waste Recycling. Bet you didn't see that coming.

What the Klout

Tweeting during your performance review to keep your Klout score up is very important if you want to continue receiving free water.



Working as an internet marketing/social media "professional" is a little interesting. At some point, as more and more internet services start to require you to login with Facebook, etc, the lines between your "personal brand" and your employer's brand start to get muddled. Which is not a good thing if they don't mesh. And, I guess, it also runs the risk of disrupting your flow of free water if you have to spend all your time tweeting for them instead.

Relevancy, we hardly knew ye

Oh hey, look, an ad for granola bars with a piece of fruit wearing dollar sign bling.

It did inspire me to write a little verse:

Yo don't you mess with my payola
Or my big bar of granola
Cuz I might hafta wreck your face
With a green Crayola

The ad:

OMG HAX

Wondering where all that Facebook spam comes from? "600,000 compromised Facebook sign-ons per day"

http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2011/10/report-600000-facebook-log-ins-compromised-per-day.html

On Consumer Habits

We live in a world where the best-selling Amazon.com item for the tabletop is a mug shaped like a toilet, and #2 is brass knuckles. No fine china, no cake plates, no sustainably forested wooden hewn cheese plates for us, folks.

Toilet mug. Betcha thought that was niche. Guess not.

Brand Extensions

They don't always make sense, you know, and social media isn't always the right place to flaunt them.

Social Media: Stop Worrying, Love the Free-For-All

Rest In Peace, Blender

Blender down, now Maxim stands alone...

Alpha Media Group closed Blender magazine today, eliminating about 30 jobs and reducing its portfolio of titles to Maxim alone. The April issue of Blender out now will be its last.

The decision, delivered to Blender staff in a meeting this morning, came as part of broader changes that also included the departure of Alpha co-CEO Glenn Rosenbloom and the integration of editorial staff for Maxim and Maxim Digital.

The remaining CEO, Stephen Duggan, said in a company memo that the company was closing Blender with great sadness. "Since 2001, Blender has provided unmatched music coverage and entertainment news in its unique voice to a profoundly dedicated audience of music enthusiasts," Mr. Duggan wrote. "We are particularly grateful to the sales team and to the tremendously talented editorial staff for their hard work and commitment to Blender."

Joe Levy, who was editor in chief at Blender, was named editor in chief of the combined Maxim editorial operation. Jim Kaminsky, Maxim magazine's editor in chief, is leaving the company. Ben Madden continues as group publisher. Jay Woodruff, editor in chief of Maxim Digital, was named chief content officer at Maxim. After the changes, Alpha will continue to employ 134 staffers.

WSJ Blundered Into World Of Paid Content

The WSJ blundered into its paid content strategy, a move the usual suspects (Michael Wolff, Wired) lamented would reduce the Journal to irrelevancy. "I made the site paid because I was ignorant, “ says former Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann. “I didn’t know any better. I just thought people should pay for content.”

It's worked well for 'em though. And in my opinion, it doesn't hurt that most subscribers can go ahead and expense it on the corporate AmEx.

But - if you already provide free content - good luck getting people to pay at this point in the game, according to this article.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-wsj-can-charge-for-online-content-and-other-papers-cant-2009-3

Attack Of The Belly Fat Ads

Short of advertisers. Desperate for revenue. Sold out to direct marketers.

These ads, which typically link to sites with names such as Becky's Weight Loss or Helen's Weight Loss, often use the same exact creative -- a before-and-after photo of a woman's belly -- and tout some secret to getting rid of a gut. Users, of course, have to click on the ad to find out more.

Online advertising start-up Rubicon Project estimates that different versions of the "belly fat" ads are now being served by half the ad networks in the U.S., sometimes accounting for as much as 30% of an ad network's total revenue.

It's all part of a larger shift toward direct-response advertising as brand dollars become harder to come by. The belly-fat ads may be unappealing and jarring on some of the higher-end sites that are running them, such as MSNBC.com, but they work, and can bring more revenue than a display ad sold on a cost-per-thousand-viewers basis.

And they won't die:

But here's the bigger problem: The process of blocking belly-fat ads for publishers that don't want them is proving particularly difficult for ad networks. The creative gets placed by numerous corporations using different tags, URLs and toll-free numbers, making them hard to track and stop automatically.

And when ad networks have unsold inventory, they'll often tap another ad network to fill it, giving belly-fat ads another side door onto websites that might not want them.

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135115

Digital mags on the rise

As a disclaimer, this is PR verbiage from digital mag publisher Zmags, but some good numbers on online traffic to magazines' websites:

Don’t worry. Your magazine did not become irrelevant and your readers did not quit on you. But readers are moving online as there is so much more to get there. While titles are closed down Magazine Publishers of America found that website traffic to US consumer magazines rose 11.1 percent in last quarter of 2008 compared to last year. In addition, time spend on the titles websites increased 34.4 percent.

Important to notify here is that you do not have to go all in, when offering digital magazines. Most of Zmags customers offer digital magazines as a supplement - rather than a substitution - to hard copies. Digitize your magazine and making it available on your website is an easy way to extend your scope and get more readers.

http://blog.zmags.com/index.php/digital-magazines-on-the-rise/

Recession SEO

If you're not SEOing to "cheap ____________", you're not SEOing at all, these days:

http://www.dmnews.com/Search-shift-fuels-recession-friendly-keyword-strategy/article/128409/

Tweet You, Pay Me

Maggiano's Italian restaurant says, add us as a friend, and tweet about us, for a chance to win $100.

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payola-now-with-extra-cheese-2009-3

In an informal count, it seems about five to ten Twitter users are tweeting Maggiano's message every minute. Or about one every ten seconds. Maggiano's now has 1,037 followers, and is gaining dozens per minute. That's thousands (tens of thousands?) of ad impressions that Brinker International is getting for its $100 gift card (and whatever it's paying someone to run the company's Twitter account).


Remember that thing about social sites creating so many highly disposable ad impressions you'll never be able to sell them...?

Social media policy, ur doin it rong

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/25/ryanair-socialnetworking

Blogger finds fail on Ryanair website, blogs about it. Ryanair employee leaves comments on his blog that are fairly inflammatory. Blogger inquires if they are authentic, receives this response from Ryanair’s corporate communications (!):

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."