I know you’ve been waiting with bated breath all holiday season to find out which of the made-up online shopping holidays would be the winner—Cyber Monday for the first time ever? Green Monday again? Brown Monday? Purplish-Blue-Like-a-Bruise Monday? Sadly, none of the above. Nope, it was some no name: Tuesday, December 15 . Coming from behind, that all-but-forgotten day of the week topped the online revenue charts for the first time with $913M in sales. That’s right, nearly one billion dollars in revenue online in one day—and yes, that would be the record for the most online spending in a single day, ever. 2009 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2008 Non-Travel (Retail) Spending Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore, Inc
Posts tagged ‘online’
Many people mistakenly think that joint ventures are only effective if you are a large player in the market that your business or product falls under. However, the truth is actually quite far away from that statement even though they are usually most notable when they involve joint ventures. For example, most people in the online community already are away of the joint venture effort between PayPal and EBay. The good news is that you can have the same success with a joint venture if you plan properly and take full use of everything that such a deal can offer. The essence of joint ventures is based around the premise of helping a small less known company get a leg up on the competition by using the customer base or popularity of another business. They are designed to help out small businesses by joining up with another company to share a customer base and promotions in exchange for either equal advertising and promotion efforts, or a small percent of the commission on sales. This is reasonable given that the sales would not have happened without the aid of the joint venture. For a company that does not have a large budget or the ability to advertise a joint venture is an easy way to gain access to a new wider customer base or potential target market. Generally they work out best when you explore businesses that are not your direct competitors, but are closely associated such as a company that sells Quickbooks if you provide accounting services. Of course, the logical question that most people have is how to find a joint venture partner. It is highly unlikely that they will come to you, so the best way is to get out there and research potential partners online. LinkedIn is also an excellent business resource online that provides plenty of social networking opportunities and connections to businesses that may be looking for potential partners. The more time you spend investigating the opportunities the more you will see them fall into your lap.
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Joint ventures are not just for the big guys
No wonder I have had this feeling lately that I am always full and the waistline is expanding a bit. It’s all this information and data that I am ingesting on a daily basis. Boy, if only limiting my data intake time would make the waistline go away I’d be there in a heartbeat but I digress. We all know that the average person is taking in more information on a daily basis than ever before but just how much is too much? According to the New York Times : The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego . According to calculations in the report, that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words. Phew! Sounds like a lot of stuff to stuff in. Now to be fair, this amount of information is not exclusively confined to the online space. The study looks at television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. Now, I am not an online gamer so that last one has me a little bit confused since that activity often appears to serve the opposite effect of draining someone’s brain so feel free to yell at me and tell me I am wrong. Television (another fine brain extraction tool which has done its damage on me over the years) takes up the first place in time committed daily that creates information overload clocking in at 5 hours a day. Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day. The computer comes in third, at just under two hours a day. Video games take up about an hour, and reading takes up 36 minutes. While the report says that the printed word gets less attention the reality is that people are reading more than ever because of their online habits. Also, there is the phenomenon of much of this activity happening simultaneously as in texting while watching TV. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. As Internet marketers these studies are important because there is just a ridiculous amount of competition for peoples’ attention. The resulting din of data and noise makes it even more important to find a way to get people at a time when THEY are ready to hear your message. The old intrusive selling model is growing less and less effective because people actually control their time more than ever as it relates to media. They engage when they want to engage where they want to engage. It used to be that you take what you get. Those days are gone. So what is your technique to cut through the noise? Is the level of noise going to continue to increase thus making it more daunting to cut through or will there come a time when a person says “I can’t eat another gig!” What’s your take?
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TMI? Americans Take In 34 Gigs of Data A Day
The move to trying to save more money online should come as no surprise to anyone for all the obvious reasons. With those reasons being so obvious we won’t belabor the point here (btw, for those wondering, the economy still kinda sucks). What is happening though, is the shift from the printed coupon to the online coupon is very real and is creating the same commotion in the heated online v. offline world as the news debate is. After all, many papers are clinging to the fact that their Sunday circulations remain OK because of the perceived savings offered by the coupons. NCH Marketing Services, a subsidiary of Valassis Communications is reporting an increase of 30% use in traditional coupons with an additional $600 million in savings by consumers. Unfortunately, we often measure just how hot an industry is by how many lawsuits it generates. Yahoo Finance reports : This past summer, Valassis won a $300 million verdict against News America Marketing (NAM), a subsidiary of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp. It accused the coupon powerhouse of trying to monopolize supermarket advertising. In July, following the verdict in Michigan’s Wayne County Circuit Court, NAM president Chris Mixson said the decision “rewards a company that turned to litigation as its business strategy rather than compete.” He said evidence barred by the court would have made a case that Valassis tried “to induce collusion when it announced its new pricing policy in a public investor call.” So as with most things, the offline world is busy navel-gazing in court while the online business is preparing to move in take control. While those two titans of paper coupons duke it out, another battleground is emerging. Although a study by Experian Marketing Services, a global information services company, assessed that 70% of households still clip coupons from newspapers, beleaguered print media companies are starting to lose their once tight grip on the market to online competitors. NCH says online coupon distribution rose 41% during the first 9 months of 2009 and RedPlum.com saw coupon prints from the site jump 51% so far this year. At year-end 2008, online coupons represented 4.8% of all coupons redeemed in the U.S., compared to 6.3% by mid-year 2009. I am still amazed at how slow and plodding the offline world is in most sectors when it comes to seeing the competitive threat that online services is. Hey, all of you folks in the printed coupon business here’s your wake up call. Google purchased AdMob to get into this business. And to prove they are serious Google has begun issuing 100,000 window stickers to businesses in more than 9,000 cities and towns. Each window decal has a unique bar code that can be scanned with the camera feature of most mobile devices. The code will then immediately load the browser with information about the business and allow access to related coupons and offers. You don’t need a printed coupon for that to work.
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Coupons Fast Becoming Online Faves
As our lives become increasingly busy we are condensing everything we do into shorter periods of time and cooking is no different. Most people lead crazily busy lives where time for cooking is at a premium but luckily help is at hand and twitter offers a variety of great ways to learn how to cook. Here are our 5 resources for cooking better food using Twitter… Rouxbe Online Cooking School @ rouxbe One of the slickest online cooking school in the world has daily video tips for you as well as handy little tips on how you can improve in the kitchen. Their blog is full of some great tips and their team of professional chefs are on hand to answer your questions when you get stuck in the kitchen. @ jamie_oliver One of the most famous chefs in the world has over a quarter of a million followers and he is constantly dispensing cooking information and will fill you full of creative ideas from his numerous Twitpics. Shares what he is eating and is a real inspiration to foodies all over the world. Twecipe This is one of the handiest tools you will ever come across on Twitter. Simply send three ingredients to @twecipe and the cute little onion will send you back a DM with a link to a recipe that matches your ingredients perfectly. You can also use the website if you want and the little onion behind the twitter account has been known to share food tips and funny food stories from around the world. @ Tastespotting One of the most stunning food websites on the planet has a vibrant and engaging twitter account that never fails to deliver equal parts inspiration and quality recipes from the world’s top food bloggers. @ simplyrecipes Elise Bauer is well known as one of the top food bloggers in the world and her recipes have fed thousand of hungry mouths around the world. Not only does her website contain an abundance of recipes but she is nearly always available on Twitter answering questions and discussing her cooking. A real angel of the cooking world who seems to be out to help everybody on the planet to cook better food! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . 5 Ways To Improve Your Cooking Using Twitter
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5 Ways To Improve Your Cooking Using Twitter
Yahoo’s taking ad targeting to a whole new level with its new Ad Interest Manager . Now advertisers aren’t the only ones who can target you—you can target yourself, too! The new AIM system enables users to select their interests and block ads outside of those interest areas. According to the press release , the tool: Provides a central point where Yahoo! visitors can assert even greater control over their online experience. Gives visitors an unparalleled view into the information used to deliver interest-based advertising. Shows the visitor both Yahoo!’s educated guesses about their interests and a summary of observations, along with other information they have provided. Provides a list of specific interest categories that Yahoo! has placed a user into and lets people turn those categories off. Allows people who don’t want to see interest-based ads to turn them off entirely. As the quote indicates, the system gives you a list of ad categories Yahoo believes you’re interested in, based on your activity on the site, including search history, and properties including Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Yahoo Groups. You can then switch off each individual category. Switch off seven categories, and the system prompts you, asking if you want to switch off all behavioral targeting. Overall, this is a smart move—allowing users to target ads to themselves insures greater value for advertisers. But the system will only work as well as its implementation—both the targeting and the promotion of the system must be good enough for the system to gain widespread use. Yahoo will have to use fairly prominent, probably front-page, promotion to not only show that are they behind this system, but to make their every day users aware of the improvements. What do you think? Will you use the AIM targeting system? As a user or an advertiser, are you excited about this?
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Yahoo Lets Users Customize Ads
Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well. Of course, when you consider that 95% of the businesses in the US are considered an SMB of some shape or size it should make one think a little more about the impact this market segment has in the overall scheme of things. Unfortunately, ‘too big to fail’ bailouts don’t await the little guy. Instead the SMB needs to make due with what they have and be as smart about how they spend their marketing dollars as possible. The Center for Media Research has released a study by Vertical Response that shows just where many of these ‘Main Street’ players are going with their online dollars. The big winners: e-mail and social media. With only 3.8% of small business folks NOT planning on using e-mail marketing and with social media carrying the perception of being free (which they so rudely discover it is far from free) this should make some in the banner and search crowd a little wary. I suppose the question is just what does increased use of social media mean? Will there be money put toward it or will it just be that the effort by the SMB social media practitioner (usually also referred to as the business owner) is increased. We’ll see. This quote from helps to frame something that most know already but have had a hard time changing. Janine Popick, VerticalResponse CEO and founder, says “… small businesses continue to allocate portions of their budget to… email and social media, despite the downturn in the economic climate… (but) marketers (still) need to help small businesses to see the value of integrating search engine marketing… into their campaigns.” Honestly, I am a little confused by some of the findings here because in the next breath we see the following: According to the study, the most important tool for small businesses to succeed in 2010 is search engine marketing, while email marketing, public relations and social media cited as crucial for success. 23.8% of all small businesses reported that search engine marketing was the tool most needed for their business to succeed in 2010. So which is it? Do they or don’t they use or want to use search marketing? Or is the better question can they or can’t they? Maybe the way that these findings seem a bit muddy is just a reflection of the struggles that many businesses have with the shift from traditional marketing to the online space. In 2010 it looks like the rubber is really hitting the road as the Internet marketing industry matures while many may end up just being left behind. Your thoughts?
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Small Business Marketing Efforts Point to E-Mail and Social Media in 2010