Not On The Internet?

Approximately one-quarter (24%) of Americans have no Internet access, according to a report titled "Information Searches That Solve Problems: How People Use the Internet, Libraries and Government Agencies When They Need Help" by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Additionally, 13% of Americans access the Internet via a dial-up service at home, 55% access the Internet via broadband at home and 9% access via broadband at work or another location.

Pew reports that those individuals with no access to the Internet tend to be older, less affluent and less educated.

Specifically, 44% of Matures or people between the ages of 62 and 71 do not have access to the Internet, and 71% of people that are older than 71 years of age do not have access to the Internet. 39% of individuals with household incomes of less than $40,000 have no access to the Internet, while 9% of individuals with household incomes of $40,000 or more have no access to the Internet.

Finally 39% of individuals at the educational level of high school diploma or less have no access to the Internet. 15% of individuals with some college have no access to the Internet. 7% of individuals with a college degree or more have no access to the Internet.

By knowing who the non-users of the Internet are, marketers can avoid spending time and money on online tactics for these groups.

Remember the Milk

Maybe you've got 10 sticky notes on your desk. Maybe you're the type that leaves your office phone voicemail messages to remind you about things, even though they're on two online calendars. You've got every company you interact with sending you email reminders, and other reminders are being sent to your cell day and night. Maybe you're just trying to figure out how to lifehack all those zen habits you've been learning.

There's lots of online to-do lists out there, but Remember the Milk is a great one. Manage tasks, set reminders, and basically get things done. No matter what your weapon of choice, be it the iPhone, Twitter, Gmail/Google Calendar, Skype, AIM, iCalendar, Yahoo!, even good old-fashioned 1-800 numbers, you can add tasks in no time.

Social Media vs Media Buying

Many companies are having a difficult time figuring out where their 2008 social media budget should come from. Is social media "PR"? Is it a media buy? The answer is neither. Social media needs a category and a budget of it's own. It would be a disservice to compare social media campaigns with media buying. With a media buy reach and costs are most important. Any marketing manager with an Excel sheet and an idea of their target market can make media buying decisions. Social media is different. While it's true that there sometimes is the first layer of media buying in a social media campaign, your ROI cannot be calculated simply by looking at that first purchase. The goal of social media is create pass-along. So when you make that initial placement it's important to know that you have the tools to track viral behavior. A successful social media campaign will always yield higher results than a typical media buy. This is precisely why companies like Google are doing everything they can to own social media properties like YouTube. So, consider your possible outcomes before you make the comparison of social media campaigns with traditional media buying.

Heavy, Moderate, and Light Online Video Viewers: How do their viewing habits differ?

comScore and Media Contacts report that heavy viewers of online video watch eleven times as much as video as moderate viewers, and 140 times as much as light viewers of online video.

According to their research, the results revealed that the heaviest viewers (top 20 percent of viewers) averaged 841 minutes of online viewing per month, while moderate viewers (next 30 percent) averaged 77 minutes per month, and the lightest viewers (bottom 50 percent) watched just 6 minutes per month each.

YouTube is used by all segments--heavy, moderate, and light. In fact, it is the top video site for all three segments, and reaches the most overall video viewers (over 50 percent reach).

The study also identified that heavy video viewers spend a lot of time at niche video-sharing sites like Ouou.com, MegaVideo.com, Youku.com, zSHARE, and Todou.com. Moderate viewers are more likely to view video content on broadcast TV sites, including WorldNow (ABC), CBS TV Local, ABC Daytime, Scripps TV, and CMT. And, light online video viewers are heavy TV viewers, with 46 percent of this group watching more than 13 hours of TV per week. (By comparison, the report found that 39 percent of moderate video viewers and 30 percent of heavy video viewers watched the same amount of TV.)

“The difference in consumption levels was astounding. The usage differences are reminiscent of the early days of the Internet,” said Jarvis Mak, vice president of research and insight at Media Contacts. “However, the networks’ online distribution of first-run content will go a long way to bridging the gaps between heavy, moderate, and light viewers.”

Video Finds its Niche

With millions of videos flooding the internet on everything from cooking to shoes to cars, it can be tough to find what you're looking for without two or three hours to spend surfing for it. Youtube has some level of organization and other general video sites are beginning to follow suit to find some way to make it easier to see the videos you want.
Enter the .tv site. I have noticed over the course of the last month or so, dozens, if not hundreds of niche video sites in beta. These sites are far more specialized and have some theme to their content. For example, celebtv.com has video about celebrities. ifoods.tv has lots of recipe and chef videos and Shoetube.tv has videos about, you guessed it, shoes. It's a pretty obvious progression for video to take. Blog set-up sites recommend having a theme or topic in order to make a blog successful and the same rules can apply to a video site.
Expect these sites to make a big debut soon and make our video viewing lives a whole lot easier.

The Power of Plain

With so many cool and innovative ideas popping up everywhere online, it can be difficult to keep up. So when learning about social media and Web 2.0 for the first time, simplicity is key. Common Craft's work illustrates this perfectly. This video production company has made its mark explaining things in a clever, creative way using paper cut-outs.

You heard that right: Paper cut-outs that are filmed and posted online. Weirdly ironic but ingenious, right?

Here's one of Common Craft's videos, "Social Bookmarking in Plain English."

(p.s. If you want a really simple way to use social bookmarks for your company's marketing, check out shoutlet.com)

Optical Media Is Dead

Do you recall the last time you put a DVD or CD (i.e. "Optical Media") into your computer? Think about it. Now with USB drives, iPhones, and memory cards, there really isn't any reason to keep those scratch-prone discs around anymore. Not to mention that they read data slower and have limited capacity. You can do almost anything you want online now. Using Google Docs is better than installing Office and downloading songs is easier than buying a CD at the store. Optical media doesn't stand a chance.

Apple's bold move to create the new Macbook Air without an optical drive is a good step in the right direction. Ever since I switched to my Flip video camera over my Canon video camera with DVC tapes, my life transferring large video files to my computer is much easier. In fact, many manufacturers are now coming out with video cameras and media players that are hard drive based. Smart move.

I applaud Apple's effort to again start a revolution. As a frequent traveler, I can't wait to get a new laptop (minus the optical drive).

E-mail Marketing--A Strong Tactic for 2008

According to the second annual survey of over 2,000 online marketing professionals, Datran Media found that 82 percent of the marketers surveyed plan to increase their use of e-mail marketing in 2008. Additionally, 55 percent of respondents expect that return on investment (ROI) from e-mail will be higher than any other media channel. This coincides with results from a Direct Marketing Association survey, which found that e-mail ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008; this is more than twice the ROI of other online mediums like search and display.

Of those who plan to use e-mail, they will employ it to send newsletters (80%), drive sales (79%), enhance customer relationships (71%), increase up-sell or cross sell opportunities (67%), increase brand awareness or lift (65%), reactivate dormant customers (53%), and send transactional messages (51%).

When the respondents were asked about what media channels complement the e-mail media channel, the respondents indicated: 72% search, 52% display, 41% direct, 25% mobile, 18% broadcast, and 11% cable.

Check out how Shoutlet 2.0 can help with your e-mail campaign initiatives.

Social Networking: Work or Play?

Comscore has released stats that, surprise, social networking sites' traffic are up. Users are reportedly spending around 200 minutes on both Facebook and Myspace per month and that's not including all of the minutes people spend on the smaller networking sites that they belong to. With all of the minutes spent on Facebook, Flickr, and Youtube, I'm starting to wonder if all of this social networking is taking place after hours or if people are checking their profiles and uploading videos while they are clocked in.
Employers, forced to re-evaluate their policies on computer time as a result, are taking many different routes on what to do about it. Some are restricting employees' access to the internet and allowing only news-y sites and industry related sites to be viewed while others are tentatively embracing the new online outlets.
It is called social net-working after all.
So how can social networking be used as a tool in the workplace? There are plenty of Facebook-type sites for business use, LinkedIn for example. Instead of collecting friends you collect business contacts. Your business contacts can write up references, recommend you for positions, and you can display your work history. People in sales might find this contact building especially helpful.
There are products like Salesforce, that can help you to manage your clients, stay organized, and track leads.
There are also numerous webinars, video conferences, and lead generation services to keep employees up to the minute on their industry. So while the line is very fine indeed between social networking and just fooling around on the internet, employers should be cautioned that keeping employees away from social networking entirely will close a potentially huge door on their visibility in the marketplace. Say you need some new business cards made and want to try a new vendor. If you have a LinkedIn contact that provides that service, it would certainly be easier to contact that person than looking blindly in the phone book.

"I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approve this text message."

Both Senators Clinton and Obama definitely approve of the success of their recent SMS campaigns, which resulted in an increase in positive perception, an increase in voter interaction - even a shift in voter intention, according to a report by Limbo, which conducted the campaign.

Between the two mobile campaigns, one million text messages were sent in January. The impact they had is impressive:

* The campaigns experienced 53 percent awareness -- better than what's expected for a traditional campaign.
* 6 percent of voters said that the advertising had changed their voting intentions significantly.
* 14 percent of text message recipients said their perception of the candidates was more positive after they got the message. With 4 percent reporting that their perception was negatively influenced, it's still a 10 percent net increase. (Obama saw the biggest boost.)
* 56 percent of recipients were happy to see the ads on their mobile phones; 13 percent were not. Men were more open to it than women, and the 25 to 34 age group were the most enthused about it.

Among the most interesting findings is the effect on voter-candidate interaction after the text messages were sent. The stats as reported by MarketingVox:

* 37 percent paid more attention to news coverage about the candidate.
* 12 percent became more aware of other marketing for the candidate.
* 7 percent visited the candidate's website, with a further 24 percent intending to do so in the future.
* 5 percent visited the candidate's mobile internet site, with a further 9 percent intending to do so in the future.

These numbers are exciting. They confirm the impact that the engagement of social media can have. And with a Democratic primary race that's so close, could social media campaigns - still considered by some to be trendy, fringe advertising efforts - contribute to persuading just enough voters to push one candidate into the nomination?

THE Conference on Marketing

I just completed a presentation this morning in beautiful Naples, FL at "THE Conference on Marketing". I appreciate my friends at Maddock Douglas for inviting me to co-present. Yep, life is tough. I met some great people during my stay there. I hope they are all checking out my blog as instructed! Seriously, I had a great time. If anyone has any questions or just wants to talk shop about Social Media, please give me a call.

Here's the clip I promised to post:




By the way, if you want to check out the camera that I used to capture you on my blog, visit: http://www.theflip.com




Rock on,


Jason Weaver

With More Podcast Listeners Comes Growth In Podcast Advertising

As defined by Wikipedia, a podcast is a collection of digital media files distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers.

eMarketer is predicting that the total U.S. podcast listening audience-- those individuals who have at least downloaded one podcast--will grow from 18.5 million in 2007 to 65 million by 2012.

The subsegment of individuals who download an average of one or more podcasts per week totaled 6.5 million in 2007 and is predicted to reach 25 million in 2012.

eMarketer also predicts that this growth will come from:

• Greater ease in consumption for podcast content.
• Growing awareness of podcasting.
• Terrestrial radio’s use and promotion of podcasting.
• Increased penetration of portable players.
• The evolution of smart phones and proliferation of affordable mobile data plans.

Along with increased listeners comes growth in advertising spending on podcasts. Advertising spending on U.S. podcasts is forecast to increase from $165 million in 2007 to $435 million in 2012.

If you’re considering podcast advertising, here are some useful tips from iMedia Connection:

• Keep the message brief; 15-second spots work best!
• Vary the creative; consumers don’t like hearing the same creative over and over.
• Podcast listeners are highly engaged in the topic; the spot should match the audience.
• Podcast ads should be placed between segments—pre-roll or post-roll.

Happy Podcasting!

Super Bowl Checklist: Chips, Beer, and Your Laptop

Super Bowl Sunday. It's arguably the biggest day in American sports -- and like many significant events, it's driving more and more traffic to the Internet.

ComScore's annual Super Bowl pre-game survey shows that both the big screen and the small screen are getting attention this year. What this year's survey respondents said also enforces what we've known here at Sway: An online strategy (particularly a highly targeted one) can boost the impact of traditional marketing and advertising efforts.

• 49% said the game is their favorite part of broadcast; while 26% said the ads are.
• Those ads are driving people to the web and engaging them with the brands online: 16% said they're planning to visit website of the Super Bowl advertisers.
  
• 13% plan to watch the ads online.
• It seems that consumer-generated ads could enjoy more positive engagement with audiences online: 25% think they will be more entertaining than professional commercials (12% think they'll be less entertaining).

"Viewers have indicated that the Internet will be a more significant part of their Super Bowl experience than last year," said Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore. "In particular, there seems to be a greater inclination to access advertisers' content online, which highlights the increasing importance of a cross-media advertising strategy."

So log on this Sunday and see what you can find. And don't forget to log on Monday to email, IM, and text your post-game analysis and any friendly jabs and sneers for the fans of the losing team.