Nielsen: Only 1.3% Of U.S. Homes Digitally Unready

TV viewing levels did decline right after the digital switch on June 12, but have since returned to previous levels, according The Nielsen Company.

According to TV research company blog postings, the decline in viewing was largely temporary; in recent weeks, it has seen audiences returning, as more homes have added converters.

Nielsen credited significant public awareness campaigns that ended with only 2.2% of television households unready for digital television when the June 12 transition hit.

That's not to say there aren't problems. Nielsen notes that as of June 28, 60% of completely unready homes -- about 1.7 million -- are able to view some television by watching a low-power station, a foreign station near the Canadian or Mexican borders or a U.S. broadcast station that is available to them via a "translator."

According to Nielsen, that means television viewing in these homes has not disappeared completely, although viewing choices are extremely limited.

iPhone Fever Spreads Across The Globe

The iPhone is increasingly going global. That's a key finding in the latest monthly metrics report from mobile ad network AdMob. An analysis by the company found that 54% of iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide in June were in the U.S., down from 61% in January. This signals that international adoption has picked up since then, although the U.S. still has by far the biggest proportion of users of any country.

The iphone is changing the industry and revolutionizing peoples access to internet. Mobile media and mobile adverting has become stronger as the iphone became more popular. Competitors must create methods for easier internet browsing to compete witht the iphone. This generates a good platform for the mobile advertising industry.

Some Social Media Research

A study, recently released by WorkPlace Media, outlines some of the hurdles facing major brands as they attempt to harness the worlds of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, to create an impact with consumers.The study, which polled office Internet users, found that 55% maintained at least one social networking account. However, of those respondents, only 43% reported accessing their social networking accounts at work, and even for those with access, 78% reported spending less than 30 minutes per day on their site(s).

Here is some extensive research on Social media. The article suggests that Social media may not be as important to marketing as people think. The overall impact of a brand's presence on social networking sites was shown to be minimal in terms of impact and perception. Since social media may be new to digital marketing it is hard to say what works and what doesn`t work. This data is hard to take as fact without knowing how the data was retrieved. The power of social media needs more time to manifest in the advertising world.

Overestimating The Power of Social Media

Perhaps because it's still a relatively new field, interactive marketers seriously lack confidence in their ability to measure the relative effectiveness of social media campaigns, according to a new study by Forrester Research. Of 119 interactive marketers asked between May and June to rank such measurement capabilities on a scale of 1 to 10 -- 1 being novice and 10 being expert -- the average response was 4.5. "We find this average ambitious considering that social media is still less than four years old," said Emily Riley, Forrester Research analyst and author of the report.

I find that Social Media is too early to claim social media as a stable in digital marketing. However I do think it is a current trend to capitalize on. Myspace, Twitter and facebook will all run its course as new mediums appear. Mobile connection may be the new frontier but it is always effective to ride the wave and speculate. The difficulty in social media, contrary to frequent discussion, isn’t in how to use the tools or the tactics. It’s not about measurement or determining ROI. Those things are tangible, and solvable, with time, dedication, and elbow grease.

#Hashtags

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
Here is a site that rates hashtags frequency.

YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye

Internet explorer 6 is loosing market share to safari and Firefox very rapidly. This maybe a consequence of the frustration that internet explorer users have been experiencing with Microsoft infamous brand. youtube has stated that they will be cutting support for the explorer. Check out the Details

The Twitter Effect

Bruno, The docu-comedy about a flamboyant gay teenager interacting with real Americans, may have suffered from a unique instant rating capability by users of twitter. With Twitter we can instantly find out what the public thinks is hot or cold. Bruno reviews by Ebert may become insignificant to the millions of views by everyday people. Twitter is consistently showing its power. READ ABOUT IT IN TIME.

Bing is Growing and Growing

Microsoft is gaining ground with its search engine Bing, but Google still dominates the market. Microsoft's Bing grabbed 5.25% of the U.S. Internet search market in the four weeks ending June 27, while Google captured 74% of the market, according to data released by Hitwise Thursday.

Yahoo took 16.2% of the search market last month -- up from May, but down from the 20% in June. IAC/Interactive Corp.'s Ask.com slid to 3.2%. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis accounted for 1.36% of U.S. searches

While the percentage for U.S. searches among the leading search engines declined for all, excluding Google, Bing still continues to see growth, Hitwise says. Looking at the weekly percentage of U.S. searches for Bing, the engine has grown an average weekly rate of 25% for June 2009.

Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the combined search engines have grown at an average of 16 percent during June 2009. Hitwise estimates that Bing grew faster than the three other prominent search engines for the month.

Microsoft continues to chip away at market share. Whitney Burk, director at Microsoft Bing, declined to comment on the Hitwise findings, but says Microsoft believes people are not overly loyal to their search engines, and many are more than willing to switch to something new.

Jacksons Death was 3rd largest web event of the year

Yesterday's funeral and memorial service for Michael Jackson was the third biggest Web event of the year, failing to be as big as news of Jackson's death, or Barack Obama's inauguration, Peter Kafka reports. Akamai, which operates a content delivery network, says it delivered 2,185,000 "live and on-demand streams" yesterday-far less than the 7 million-plus streams it delivered during Obama's inauguration.

An unfortunate event like this needs no advertising. I feel that would be in bad taste. However it would be good to provide the viewers with live, up to date and complete coverage to keep brand loyalty and provide a good service the viewers. Very interesting though.

Facebook Now For An Older Bunch

Strategy Labs have released very valuable information about the demographics of Facebook.

Facebooks bread and butter have been teens and young adults since its birth in 2004. But it appears as a new older batch of users are drastically outnumbering the younger users. I am not sure how Strategy Lab retrieved this information or what their methods of data retrieval is, but I find this new information on demographics questionable.

I am guessing that facebook estimates the users age by the submitted date during registration. But the new "blocking" trend in facebook (just putting the birthday and not the year) could leave large numbers of high school and college students in the unknown group of 55,000,000+.
I have 940 friends on facebook, mostly high school and college. Mostly all of them hide their birth year. Out of my nearly 1000 friends a dozen or so are in the "older" age group. How does Stredegy Lab take that into account?
Under the people you may know application that suggests freinds to me, I am rarely reffered to older people in or around my network.

Does this speak on the actual demographic or does it reflect facebooks unintential ability to segregate the different age groups?

Or am i just not freinds with many older people?

I just found it interesting how accurate the data was for Stradegy Media.

BING

I found this homemade Bing information advertisement pretty interesting. This video shows some of the features of bing. I like how the video markets bings ability to cut down on search overflow and get the user directly to what they want to see. I have been trying to use bing to get more fluent. Lets see how effective bing is.

Online Ad Spending Rises At Double-Digit Rates, Gains Share Vs. All Other Media

The agency estimates that Internet ad spending will expand 10.1% in 2009, an increase of more than 1.5 percentage points over its last forecast in April.

This is amazing as the internet is becoming the dominant medium information. This dominance is slowly affecting the advertising world as well.

-"By 2011 we expect it to account for 15.1% of all ad expenditures, up from 10.5% in 2008," the report predicts. "Most of this growth will come from paid search, which is an ideal method of reaching consumers looking for bargains. In the U.S., we predict search advertising to grow 20.0% in 2009, while traditional display grows 3.0% and classified grows just 1.8%." -

Entertainment News Sites Boosted by Online Video

A recent comScore report says that nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May 2009, representing a 7% increase versus the previous year. Online video has also become an increasingly important channel for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed growing 53% in the past year. In total, Americans spent more than 893 million minutes, approximately 15 million hours, on entertainment news sites, with 44% of the total time spent in the category occurring at work.


ONLINE VIDEO BREAKDOWN

New Ad Formats On WebPages

37 sites will have the new advertising format. It is very important that advertising stays up to date and innovative, so the companies can profit off the ever changing internet. I found this very interesting.

These features will include:
The Fixed Panel (336 wide x 700 tall), which remains in view as a user scrolls up or down the page.
• The XXL Box (468 x 648), the extra wide side-of-page ad that expands to 936 x 648 and includes page-turn and video capability.
• The Pushdown (970 x 418), which opens big to display the ad and then after seven seconds rolls up to the top of the page (collapsing to 970 x 66).
An initial group of 24 OPA members including The Times, Forbes and ESPN committed to begin making the new standards available to advertisers by July. More than a dozen other Web publishers have since joined the effort, with the 37 participating sites reaching a combined 132.2 million visitors, according to the OPA.

Check out more info on the new advertising format.

Twitter personlization

Twitter has been called the shiny new toy of social media. I have learned from Don that twitter fits an older more tech savvy demographic. Well twitter is allowing customization on their pages that will hopefully catch the interest of younger users. Customization has become key in social media as social media inherently celebritizes the user. Everybody is a star on facebook, myspace and now twitter. This website surveys the different types of themes and applications you cna put on your twitter.


"Everybody Is A Star"

Interesting Sites.

I was introduced to some sites this morning that were very interesting.

Wetpaint:

WetPaint.com is a site that lets you create a community site for any topic. Its a way for everyone to operate a site and build a community that shares a similar interest. I found the wetpaint page a Television community site. This community site is a TVfan index of what shows are most popular with Wetpaint users. I am unsure about the validity of the Tvfan index page but the website does offer a service rarely seen.

Collecta:

This site is a search engine that does live search of topics within the internet and most especially social networking sites.

Crowdeye:

CrowdEye succeeds in giving greater context to results, digesting meaning through graphs,categorizing search terms and highlighting links, as well as displaying recent topical tweets.

Happin.n:
Searches through Twitter for tweets any user suggested topics. Crowdeye and collecta provide similar service for twitter.

iMedia 25: Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators

Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators



Don Steele made the iMedia Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators. Congrats.

ARE YOU AFFECTED?

How will they affect you?

This article on iMedia was pretty interesting. It talked about current trends and how they can effect your business and marketing strategy. These trends ranged from the growth of social media in digital advertising and marketing to the economy and the inevitable cuts is budget.

Here are some article highlights
* Twitter broke into the mainstream, turning many on to its power as a branding
channel
* Despite dire predictions, display has remained resilient
* More brands have embraced social media, helping them solve potential brand disasters quickly
* The economy has left several top advertisers in tough shape, which could be devastating for agencies in the future

Search Engine Optimization, How to get your page noticed!

Running a website is essentially like running a business. Having plenty customers is analogous to having plenty page viewers. But how can we reach out to potential viewers? Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website. Don sat me down and discussed exactly how to gain direct views and drive traffic to my site. He expressed to me that on search engines there are "natural" and "paid" searches. A natural search can be obtained through the relevancy and of the page and the popularity of the page. A paid search is obtained through paying to have your content advertised.

I could also drive traffic to this blog by advertising it on my facebook status and my twitter tweets. This is a direct way of getting to a close network of people I may already know to view my site. Also engaging people about the site instead of simply posting about it may also be very helpful.

I should make sure that the content on my blog reflects what my blog is about to build page relevancy. (A blog about digital marketing should literally mention digital marketing numerous times) I also learned I could link in and link out of sites to drive traffic.

All of these techniques are ways of promoting my blog and getting my page views.
How successful is your site?

Thoughts On The Future Of The Small Screen

Remote Control Marketing: Don't Interrupt; Interact

8 hours and 27 minutes is the average amount of time the average American spends in front of the TV. Wow. That gives a lot of opportunity for advertisers. This article talks about digital TV and its potential in the advertising world. The article claims that internet advertising is immature and not yet proven it self to be highly effective advertising medium. I am not sure how internet advertising is not proven itself as highly effective if internet advertising brings in billions of dollars a year. However the article proceeds to talk about how the arrival of digital TV technology is the wake-up call for TV advertisers because it enables a new way to communicate with their constituents.

The term “Remote Control Marketing” was used to describe a marketing technique that viewers will experience when they could control what they would like to interact with online.

Very interesting