Alert Blog Reviews

No, it’s not the latest fad diet: Marketing Pilgrim. Marketing news, folks. How many of us have stared at the thousands of spam messages and wondered, “Why on earth do they keep sending this crap out? It can’t possibly be effective . . . can it?” Unfortunately, incredibly, in some industries, the answer is yes. As MediaPost reports, a small study showed that even recipients without weight issues opened and purchased from spam weight loss emails, as published in the Southern Medical Journal this month. Though the sample size was only 200 (and probably not representative—students at a single New York commuter college), the findings are startling: 18% of those without weight issues opened the spam emails and 5% actually purchased. Of those who identified themselves as having weight issues, 40% opened the spam and 18% purchased. MediaPost clarifies that these numbers aren’t necessarily great on their own: “The study does note that the purchasing behavior is at a lesser level than a six-country survey for any health or pharmaceutical product.” However, the fact that even those outside the target audience opened and bought from a spam email is pretty significant. MediaPost also notes that the emails appeal to a “captive, maybe even desperate audience” (and if you’ve ever really battled your weight, you know that feeling), so these findings probably won’t apply across the board. And given that one out of twenty non-target audience members also purchased, suddenly I’ve lost hope that those dozen daily Viagra ads will go away. What do you think? Is the study skewed? Or is spam really that effective (for some products)?

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Spam Works for Weight Loss

You don’t have to look very far, especially in the online space, to find a disgruntled AT&T wireless customer. If you would like to increase your likelihood of finding a seething AT&T wireless customer just ask around in New York and San Francisco for iPhone users. This, in and of itself, is not news. As a result though, AT&T faces reputation issues that are extending beyond the initial complaints about service. As the company struggles to maintain some positive buzz it is running headlong into the ‘perception is reality’ of today’s world. When there are article headlines on CNNMoney.com like this one, “AT&T: The Most Hated Company in iPhone Land” , it’s hard to not cringe no matter how you feel about the company, its service or anything else. One thing that the article does point out is that AT&T may be a victim of its own iPhone success. Analysts say AT&T’s problems would have happened on any network that carried Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone because of the overwhelming amount of data downloaded by iPhone users. Over the past three years, AT&T’s data traffic increased 5,000% because of the iPhone. “The challenges that AT&T has are being faced by a lot of operators around the world: Very rapidly growing usage coupled with dense populations,” said Daniel Hays, wireless expert and partner at consultancy PRTM. “Would it have been different on Verizon? Probably not.” Now, of course Verizon would dispute that position and they have been doing so with their “There’s a map for that!” campaign. Verizon’s ‘first to market’ ads had to be responded to, in a sense, by AT&T which put AT&T on the defensive. The results are some pretty weak ads using a B-list celebrity that don’t do much to fight off the perception that AT&T is just a poor service provider. I was enlightened to some degree by the CNN article despite the headline. It pointed out some of the cold hard realities of being the network for iPhone users. The biggest is that iPhone users have increased the data traffic on the network at the incredibly large percentage noted earlier. AT&T admits that service in two of the most important metros for the wired set, New York City and San Francisco, are below their standards so they at least admit that they have issues. Regardless of that admission though the following is the reality they face: It’s not just New York and San Francisco iPhone users who are grumbling. An annual Consumer Reports study recently rated AT&T (T, Fortune 500) the worst in customer satisfaction in 19 cities across the country. (Rival Verizon Wireless rated No. 1 in the study.) This stuff spreads like wildfire online and becomes bigger and bigger if not handled well. To this point it appears as if AT&T has not been doing such a good job of turning that perception around. A perception that may have some cold hard reality attached to it might come off better if addressed proactively rather than having the current reactive stance (My opinion of course and we would love to hear yours ) So how do you know that the ‘you know what’ has hit the fan with your company’s reputation online and offline? You become the butt of a Saturday Night Live joke. “It was reported this week that Google would soon launch its own cell phone as a challenge to the iPhone,” said “Saturday Night Live’s” Seth Meyers on Dec. 19. “Also a challenge to the iPhone? Making phone calls.” So, all of you online reputation management experts out there what do you think AT&T should do? Is there anything it can do? A little end of the year exercise in applying all that theory might do us all some good. Let’s hear it.

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AT&T’s Struggles With Reputation Continue

Shocked aren’t ya? It really is two days before Christmas because there is just not much happening. The folks at Harris Interactive are still working though and reporting that we are spending more time online than ever before. This will surprise no one but the report digs into some of the specifics of age groups which is always of interest. Honestly though, no surprises there either. TechCrunch tells a little about the study and what possible effects on the results could be: Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that. There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002, although Harris says this could have something to do with the outbreak of the financial crisis and the lead-up to the presidential election in October 2008. The study is about personal time on line and is not inclusive of e-mail time. Based on that, we are talking about just short of 2 hours per day online on average. Here is the data that may be of service to you. There are no real surprises here. I think the shock of the proliferation of the online life is wearing off. There are likely to be other spikes moving forward like the increase of use of the mobile web that will be the new measure of growth online. I suspect that if Harris did some polling around that there would be great interest in the trending. Maybe that will help us identify when the real “Year of Mobile” was or is to be.

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We Are Spending More Time Online According to Harris

2009 cannot be over quick enough for the newspaper business. The year was full of bad news, followed by worse news, which in some cases, ended in business ending news. The prognosis for the future is not real rosy either so what can the reeling industry do? One thing is to erect pay walls but we’ve heard enough on that one. One thing that the industry can do is embrace social media and in particular, Twitter, to get the attention of the digitally inclined. The Bivings Report decided to do conduct an imperfect study of the use of Twitter by the newspaper industry. To their credit The Bivings Report themselves noted that the study was imperfect which shows some considerable integrity and makes their findings of greater interest to someone like myself. Their blog states: …..we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter. Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often and the manner in which the accounts are updated and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion. So the results are just that: thought provoking. Here is a sample. Only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website – A head scratcher for sure. Why wouldn’t you promote your use of Twitter? 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website – Another curious thing since most major newspapers can have several accounts for individual reporters etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to make it easy t find these people. The study noted that the LA Times does a nice job of this . The average account has 3,447 followers if you removed 4 statistical outliers who had over 100,000 followers. Include the outliers and the average jumps to over 17,000 per account. Gotta love statistics! The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture, The Denver Post’s Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald). 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The findings also showed that the interactivity of the newspaper Twitter users was not very high but it also was not completely void. The fear of most is that the newspapers were simply automating tweets but that didn’t appear to be the case. So this certainly shows some areas of hope for newspapers since they seem to be adopting Twitter as a resource to reach potential readers. It also shows that there is a ways to go before the full impact of a service like Twitter may be felt in the newspaper industry. Do you follow any newspapers? Do you care to do so if you are not currently? What would be your expectation of a newspaper’s Twitter feed? Give us your opinions as quickly as possible so we can put the print edition of Marketing Pilgrim to bed. Oh that’s right, we don’t do that. Sorry.

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How Newspapers Use Twitter

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

Oh, how I wish this was a cool YouTube video that could go viral. But it’s not. Instead, it’s some pretty interesting research by PostRank on how reader engagement in blogging has evolved over the last three years. Not so surprisingly, trackbacks as a means of joining the conversation have dropped off in favor of taking the discussion to Twitter or other social sites. Over the last there years, trackbacks have dropped from 19% of total engagement to 3%, while social networks have soared from

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The Evolution of Blogging

Performics reports that Twitter may be the place to get your brand mentioned if you want social networkers’ attention, according to MediaPost . Nearly half (48%) of those who saw a brand mentioned on Twitter turned to a search engine to research that brand. Other social networks lagged far behind, with 34% researching. However, the study of 3000 active social networkers showed that 70% were on Facebook, and 22% were on Twitter. So of those respondents, 32 researched a brand from Twitter, while Facebook sent 714 running to their search engine of choice. 30% of those surveyed admitted they’ve learned about a product, service or brand from a social network (considerably more than the

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Consumers Sharing Brand Opinions on Social Networks