Alert Blog Reviews

I trust you had a great Christmas! As our minds dream of how fantastic 2010 will be, it’s time to look back at the hot topics of 2009. Here are Marketing Pilgrim’s top ten most read posts in 2009. Bing.com; Is it Worth Switching from Google? – A home run for Microsoft? While Bing certainly deserves credit for being the first serious challenger to Google, it didn’t hurt that 2009 was the year that Microsoft stepped-up its media outreach to us. Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – This post was written in 2007 and has been in our top five for the past 3 years! Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide – A great guest article by Jon Rognerud and it still stands-up as a great primer for social media marketing. 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – A smart blogger knows not to simply update a popular post. Instead, you think of ways to expand on it–with a new post! This post from December 2008, added 8 more great monitoring tools for reputation monitoring. 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter – Back before there Twitter Lists were just a twinkle in the eye of Twitter’s founders, Brian Chappell authored the definitive list of marketers on Twitter. If we hadn’t introduced a policy to close comments on older posts, I believe this one would have easily broken 1,000 comments by now! 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs – Just a little over a year ago, I spilled the beans on the plugins that power Marketing Pilgrim. Look for a new, updated list, in the New Year! Google Offers Cheap Online File Storage With a Catch – How in the world did this benign looking post from 2007 make it into our top ten list of 2009? Good keywords! The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing – My good friend Ben Wills authored this post in 2006–which at the time was groundbreaking. In fact, I blatantly–with his permission–used it to frame an entire chapter of Radically Transparent! Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results – Do you get the feeling that we have a good grasp of reputation management issues? This post is over 2 years old, but, aside from the Google Pages reference, is still remarkably relevant. Facebook Really Does Make Mone y – When it comes to Facebook, I tend to defer to Jordan’s critical eye. She never fails to deliver! Some observations: As of today, Marketing Pilgrim consists of 6,792 (make that 6,793 with this one) posts and more than 45,000 comments! That’s a lot of words! Traffic was up 17.54% in 2009 compared to 2008. Not a bad growth rate! Referrals from Twitter were up 120%!!! Referrals from Yahoo were down 13%. Our own URL shortener– Gri.ms –let us track the origination of around 10,000 visitors! We know where you live! Want to see previous years’ top posts? Check out 2006 , 2007 and 2008 .

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The 10 Most Popular Marketing Pilgrim Posts of 2009

If you are new to the world of social media marketing it is helpful to know where to start networking.  The best places are the social networks that already have a large amount of traffic and members because social media marketing is a time consuming task.  Thus, you want to make sure that you narrow your markets down to the areas where you can have the largest impact which is why you may want to read about the top social media marketing websites.  College craze gone viral: The Facebook The Facebook started with just four schools in Boston and grew into one of the hottest social networks online.  By building a business profile and taking care to friend everyone you know you can quickly spread the word about your business via their profiles attracting people as they read their friends profiles.  Like most social networks, The Facebook can be used like a spider, once it gets going it continues to spread like rapid fire. The Celebrity network: Twitter Twitter is probably one of the most famous social networks due to the fact that celebrities use it on a frequent basis.  In the same way that celebrities keep their names fresh and current by ‘twitting’ so that their fans stay abreast of the activities, you can use Twitter to keep your business name, sales, and promotions fresh in patrons minds. Add in the fact that you can twit for your business and catch people while they are already outside of the home, and you have a slam dunk for getting customers inside your doors on a regular basis with an appealing enough Twit. The professional network: Linked In For those who are looking at social media marketing as a way to strengthen their business or start a joint venture the best social network on the web is LinkedIN.  Here you can find professionals from all walks of the world who you can network with to exchange advice, business ideas, and possibly even financial backing if you align yourself with the correct contact.

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Social media marketing top websites

Facebook has drubbed MySpace on almost all fronts—in the media, with users, in growth, in traffic—except ad revenue. But expect that to change next year, according to eMarketer : “It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace.” The projections for next year show MySpace on a downward trend, falling from $490M worldwide this year to $385M next year. Facebook on the other hand is still climbing: from from $435M this year to over $600M next year. Meanwhile, overall social network ad spending is going up. eMarketer predicts 7.1% growth for total ad spend next year, bringing the total to almost $1.3B. Although they initially expected 2009 to see a downturn in revenue, now the stats show 3.9% growth over last year. Back in September, we saw that 20% of all online advertising was on social networks , with MySpace slightly leading Facebook (9.2% to 8.2%). I suppose we can expect the social share of online advertising to continue to grow—but not MySpace’s. The biggest factor contributing to Facebook’s revenue growth this year, according to ClickZ , is its growth. They reached 200M users in April —and just five months later, they’d added another 100M users . Now at 350M active users, Facebook has doubled in size since February of this year. Yeah, I’d say that would drive some revenue growth. What do you think? Will Facebook really pass MySpace? How has MySpace been able to retain its revenue lead for so long?

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Facebook Set to Pass MySpace Revenue Ahead of Schedule

It’s hard to believe that 2009 is finally coming to an end. As is always a very popular practice the media likes to take us on a stroll down Memory Lane but make sure we take a brief turn onto Morbid Court. Why? Because it is important to recap what celebrities either died or train-wrecked their lives in the past year. I admit that I read these lists more often than I should and often have the “I didn’t know they died!” moments which do literally nothing to make life better. They just happen. So why not look at how advertisers may have or could have benefited from celebrity news that range from death to sordid trysts to you name it? Search Engine Watch has spoken to Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and came away with this The sudden death of actress Brittany Murphy this week tied a morbid bow on a big 2009 trend — that of celebrities dying and falling from grace. According to Blogads CEO Henry Copeland, the unfortunate events provided advertisers on his network, at times, with a considerable amount of additional exposure at no cost. At this point there are a million places to go with this one and most are not complimentary. I am going to stay on the purely business side of this one though which is sordid enough. Basically, there appears to be a little disappointment from CEO Copeland in the structure of the advertising world as agencies and red tape don’t allow for advertisers to fully take advantage of traffic spikes due to these ‘events’. Though Copeland explained that his company could get campaigns “up and running in a matter of hours,” he said that Blogads didn’t receive any calls from marketers during the celebrity events. “Most major brand campaigns are planned weeks or months…ahead of time. So we haven’t had any ‘drive-by’ advertisers hop on a hot story.” He continued, “We don’t anticipate this kind of demand going forward because of the way the ad agencies and their clients are structured… There’s just [too many] decision-makers and [too much] budgeting, time-lag, and iterative looping built into the process. A really agile and smart advertiser should jump into these stories; but the structure of the ad industry makes it almost impossible.” Well, this just seems too good of an idea to pass up! I have the solution to this and I sure hope that no one takes this one and runs with it. I am going to hang out my shingle for my new ad agency called “Advertising Ambulance Chasers”. I think I will add the tag line: “We Get You There Even Before the Lawyers”. I understand traffic is critical for advertisers but are we going to be heading down this road to make sure that we advertise around tragedy because its good business? I hope not. We can leave that to the cable news networks who don’t realize just how pathetic they look when they make all of their pretty graphics and pithy sayings around the major headlines of the day which are always about some form of pain and suffering. Maybe I am just being naive and it doesn’t really matter how you get the exposure just as long as you do. Imagine though, that people get used to your brand showing up around tragic events? Just seems odd to me. As an advertiser or just an Internet marketer in general, what are your thoughts on trying to be ‘agile enough’ to advertise where the trouble is? Is this how you would like to have your brand known? Is there any potential harm in trying to be a morbidly opportunistic marketer? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Celebrity Death and Misfortune May Help Advertisers

It is often pointed out that the disconnect from those in the social media trenches to those in the C-level corner offices is significant and often damaging to the marketing efforts of many companies. While it can be fun to generalize and then make those at the top of the marketing food chain the culprits in the “Great Social Media Under-utilization Caper” it is starting to become much less accurate. One way to see that CMO’s are taking a real interest in social media and user generated media as part of their overall marketing efforts is to see the results of a recent study done by the CMO Club. That’s right. CMO’s hang out in a club while you slave away at your community building efforts. It’s all cigars and mahogany furniture around the fireplace for the CMO set. Just kidding. In fact, The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice surveyed 133 active CMO’s to get their real world take on social media. Here’s how the respondents were broken out Of these, 42% focus on business-to-consumer marketing, 41% focus on business-to-business marketing, and 17% market to both consumers and businesses. Leading participating industries include software/hardware (17%), finance/insurance (9%), travel/hospitality (9%), media/publishing (9%), consumer goods (8%), and retail (7.5%), among others. Annual revenues ranged from $6 to $50 million (25%), $51 to $999 million (42%), and over $1 billion (23%). So what did they find? This chart is pretty telling as they attack the three letters that keep most CMO’s up at night: ROI. ROI is certainly the Holy Grail of the C-suite with regard to every facet of marketing. What makes it difficult for social media is that there are not real clearly defined measurements or metrics that create a line to what is termed social commerce. Whether you are a C-level marketer or a day-to-day social media practitioner what are your thoughts on measurement in the social media space? What do you use for tools where are you having success and where are you having trouble? Feel free to download a white paper synopsis of some of the findings of the survey. Maybe the more that C-level marketers and the ‘rank and file’ of marketing work together there can be more advancement in this emerging field. Is that a reality at your work or is that just a fantasy?

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The CMO Club Lets You In On Their Social Media Thinking

In an informal survey it would be interesting to know how many of our readers that made it this far into the post use TweetDeck as their third party Twitter app. I for one do on the desktop and as my mobile Twitter app in an iPod Touch. Alas, the old Blackberry disconnect ends my ability to be a full fledged TweetDecker. Are you a TweetDeck user? If not what are your preferred third party Twitter apps. Just let us know for kicks. So why the interest in TweetDeck? Well, it looks like they are at least finding a way to generate some revenue. In the past the application provider has offered skins for their service for bands like Blink182 but now the film industry is getting on board. Mashable reports TweetDeck kicked off the series with a Warner Brothers partnership for the studio’s upcoming film version of Sherlock Holmes — the accompanying theme, “TweetDeck Telegram Co.,” is now available for download. While I suspect I am not the target market for these things it could be interesting to see just how this kind of promotional option pans out for Warner Brothers. It’s certainly worth a try right? If there is a chance to customize your TweetDeck and be tied into something that is important to you (even for a short time) I imagine there is a decent amount of TweetDeckers who could be takers. In the age of quality trumping quantity in marketing (finally!) it could be a good play if the price is right. TweetDeck says it will be partnering with record labels, bands, movie studios and other media companies to release more themes over the coming year……….Each will present a custom look and feel as well as a dedicated channel for the artist or film alongside the user’s existing TweetDeck columns. In the Sherlock Holmes theme, the dedicated channel features a window into the 221b game. So what’s your take on this kind of promotion? Is there something you would like to see from the folks at TweetDeck? Let’em know!

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Sherlock Holmes Uncovers TweetDeck Promo Potential

Well, since everybody rolled out the trends of 2009 at the beginning of December , there’s really nothing left to do this year but make predictions for next year, right? Forrester is going to kick us off with predictions for marketing in social media . Naturally, they see major growth coming in the SMM arena (which they call “social computing,” but I think that’s something different . . . ). In fact, they see 2010 as they year social media marketing reaches maturity, with marketers (and not just SMMs) focusing on measurement and even getting budgets. The rise of SMM will lead to more transparency and interactivity, Forrester predicts. And that will make SMM even more valuable to companies. Oh, and Twitter will reach profitability —or be acquired. Of course, all this won’t come without challenges. With much of social media still a highly fractured, siloed space, many marketers will have to prioritize various social networks—will they spend their time focusing on getting Twitter right or really interacting with Facebook fans? Meanwhile, they’ll also have to make sure their social media is ready for the mobile web. And of course, measurement continues to be a challenge. Says Forrester: Marketers don’t think they’re very good at measuring social media: On average, they rate their own efforts to measure social initiatives at 4.5 out of 10.3 And there’s no silver bullet — depending on marketers’ objectives and the technologies they’re using, any of dozens of different metrics could be appropriate. But one thing’s for sure: With the need for accountability rising, marketers can’t keep pretending that fans and followers are useful success metrics . In 2010, marketers will finally start to focus on the metrics that match their objectives — and metrics that their CMOs already know and trust. Forrester also explains how they can do this—just like we measure just about anything else. Set a goal, then figure out what metrics will help you meet that goal and track them. (Forrester notes that a lot of these metrics may be more intangible,” like brand awareness and likeability requiring “brand surveys, sentiment analysis, and Razorfish’s SIM score,” in addition to more traditional hard numbers in sales.) What do you think? What metrics are most important in your social media marketing? How do you track them?

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Starting Up the Social Media Marketing Prediction Engine