Google Real Time Search Launch!

Just few minutes ago, Google launches the Real-Time Search function that feed the content from Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc that embed in the Search Result under tab : "Latest Results" that you can see the screenshot following that I just seen it live here. There will be available for more keywords very soon!

You can also see more details about this new launch at Google official blog : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html

New Algorithms of Google Ranking

There are some new updates of Google Algorithms that I would like to summarize as following.

Recently Matt Cutts explained Google's introduction of new ranking factor Site Speed into the algorithm, which will take into consideration how fast a site or page loads. In the future, faster Web pages will rank better than slower ones. Page speed is a factor in the search ad AdWords quality score and there is a push to make it a factor in the organic ranking algorithm, which has more than 200 factors in the algorithm, Schwartz writes. A video explains the rollout of Google Caffeine in January 2010, and introduces Site Speed. In early this month, Google introduce Closure Tools for optimizing the script in order to get high performance of Javascript code, you can get more information from this official page : http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html

Also, Google start showing the site navigation, adding Site Hierarchy into search result. That you need to create a site with clear hierarchy and text links, Create a site map with links to important pages.

This is the official caption from Google Blog that will see their continuously improvement of ranking algorithms.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Best Ways to Measure a Social Media Campaign

To know how successful of social media campaign , you need to get the right measurement metrics that can judge whether is it successful or not. I always use these 5 key metrics in order to measure the social media campaign .

Metric 1 : Traffic

You need to monitor the traffic before and after you launch social media campaign, also you can analyze the source of traffic by using your analytics tool such as Google Analytics. It can know as referral source and also direct traffic and also keyword search as well.

Metric 2 : Interaction
You can measure the interaction of social media campaign by using different key measurement , for example : in Twitter, you can use Retweet figure to measure how successful in each message or campaign message that you send out each time. For the blog and also youtube.com , you can see how much people Response / Comment on your post. It will be count both negative , neutral and also positive sentiment.

Metric 3 : Sales

For the sales, if you using the Google analytics tool or other well known tool, you can determine the source of traffic which generated the sales and you can measure the return on investment, conversion rate from each visits compare to other traditional media, search marketing and also display advertising as well.

Metric 4 : Leads

Some website, there is no e-commerce transaction but it is lead generating site. You can use Lead as your major KPI to measure how successful of converting visitor from social media to be prospect buyer (lead). You can use Google Analytics and set up goal for lead in this case.

Metric 5 : Engagement

For the engagement measurement, the ideal you can measurement by using average time spent on the site that it is easier to track on the visitors who came from social media campaign (using Google analytics tool).

1 Billion Views a day at Youtube

On October 9, Youtube reached the 1 Billion Views of Video a day, there are some interesting information from CEO & Co-Founder , Chad Hurley as following.

Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn't our business; it's yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We're working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world's largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.

iPhone's Google Maps app now shows Adwords now

You may noticed the new "Sponsored Link" search results showing up when you search in Google Maps on your iPhone? These new search results are Google adwords ads. They're easy to pick out, because they use a customized icon instead of the typical push pin icon. While it's not surprising that Google is going to want to find every way possible to monetize its mapping service, it's still a little disconcerting to see these results popping up.

Given this obvious new revenue stream, it makes us wonder whether Apple wants to get in on the lucrative mapping action. Their recent purchase of the mapping service company Placebasecertainly suggests the possibility. That makes the share of Google increase significantly during the last week.

50 Best Websites in 2009 (by Time Magazine)

I just read from Time Magazine that they post the list of 50 Best Websites. You can see the full list from this URL : Full List 2009 , the first one is Flickr. Most websites are hottest websites and web 2.0 concept, such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Hulu, Kayak ,etc. You will see significant different from the List from 2008. Full List 2008 , in 2008, they are few list of Web 2.0 and Communication tool like this year. 2009 is golden year of Social Media.

Social Media Figure Interesting!

During this early of September, I am quite busy with several digital marketing projects. That I have less time to work on this blog. I am trying to update as much as I can. Keep update from me via RSS. Today I have found some interesting about Social media about CTR when it is the best time that most people clicking. It interesting that people most click on mid of week. Tuesday is the day of the week when click-through rates are highest on content posted on the walls of brand pages on Facebook, at 9.89%."

The Digital Disconnect’ Emerges'" study found that even though 52% percent of the 1,000 women surveyed have befriended or become a fan of at least one brand on a social network, 83% nonetheless feel 'neutral' or 'negative' when they see a brand on a social networking site. Only 17% said they feel positive."

Who's on Twitter

I just review the research paper about Twitter, it quite interest to learn about Demographic data of Twitter users. More than one-half of all Twitter users (53%) are women, and the majority are young. Among users who disclose their age, 66% are under 25, and another 15% are ages 25 to 29. That's huge market for consumer products which target to teenagers.

Most Twitter users are quiet: 85.37% tweet less than once per day. Only about 1.1% of users update their timeline an average of more than 10 times daily. This means a small group of users dominate the Twitter timeline—75% of all Twitter activity comes from just 5% of users.

Marketers are also more likely to update than the average Twitter user. More than 65% post less than once daily—significantly better than the 85.4% overall figure. Another 6.3% of social media marketers post twice per day (compared with 2.8% overall), and 4.3% post at least nine updates per day (versus 1.31% overall). There are significant growth of using social media for marketing campaign. The new digital marketing plan, it always included Twitter and Facebook as tools for communicating to target audience.

Win 25,000 GBP for your DMO idea! UBUNTU Awards for South Africa

I have found one interesting contest. The Ubuntu awards have been announced and its all about ideas for a campaign (online / ofline etc) to run in January / Febuary 2010.

The proposal must be for £25,000 and we are looking for:

• The quality of execution
• The breadth of elements used in the campaign
• The success in the way the elements are linked to provide a 360 degree campaign.
• The innovation that will make South Africa stand out as a destination
• The expected return on investment.

Full Information for this competition at http://www4.southafrica.net/ubuntuawards/Default.aspx

Social Technographics Customers Profile

If you are looking for doing customer profile on Social Media campaign, you may use this data tool from Forrester. It quite interesting. Forrester's Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation.

Features of this profile:

- For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation
- Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.
- The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.
- The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.
The message "No data available" appears when you request a profile for which our survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to "Not specified".

Social Media Revolution

There are some Social Media revolution which significant to our digital life. You can see summarize as following.

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months. Who will be next?
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
• Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
• comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
• 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
• The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
• If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
• Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations , Only 14% trust advertisements
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI, 90% of people that can TiVo ads do. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009 , 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
• According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
• Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

10-step for successful social media

This below is the idea about 10-step for successful social media. You can use this adapt into your campaign.

1. You have to listen to/observe what the target audience is doing in social media. What they interesting / what topic that they most discuss and what website they referring to.

2. Create a “social object” that is relevant to the

brand and of genuine interest.

3. Segment the target into tribes. Give them

something they can join. We cannot convey the same message to all people, we need to segment it and convey the right message to right people.

4. Allow them to engage via their preferred

platform of choice—create multiple interfaces

to your community. Some people love video, some people crazy in photo, we can let them what they prefer that will give them unlimited ideas.

5. Make the experience better when shared. Make the people feel good experience when they are engaging, don't make them fear , such as over-throw messages and some scam things.

6. Optimise your content for sharing—particularly via newsfeeds and Twitter. To be remember that, Newsfeed and Twitter, people pull information, if there are lot of content which duplicated or not interesting, people will stop pulling that and you will loss that group of people.

7 . Use paid-for media to get the ball rolling. Advertising & PR will help pushing the campaign and let people aware of the campaign message. It should be integrated communication, most important thing, it must be the same big idea as social media that people will interest in one topic.

8. Take advantage of extreme targeting offered by social networks.

9. Make sure you have the resources to manage your community management and refresh the content.

10. Track the results and optimise. It is most important thing to do that you will measure how effective of campaign when you run the social media campaign.

Eye Tracking Study 2009

I have found this presentation of Eye Tracking Study in 2009 , that focus on Social Website like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube.com that we can see how user behavior when they are using social media site. For this research , It will answer you this question. "Will people click the ads in social networking sites?

- The study found that 65% of participants engaged with sponsored ads within the first 10 seconds of their search.
- Scan paths do not follow the order of the search result positions. Often, sponsored ads were looked at before the third or fourth result.
- There is not a significant difference in fixation duration across the first four results or sponsored ads on both Facebook and YouTube.
- 50% of participants were satisfied with their brand search on Twitter. Many liked that they could find the most current opinions about a product.

New Twitter Toyota Community

Toyota creates a new Twitter-oriented microsite called Harmony Tweets that is being used to promote the Toyota Prius.
In Harmony Tweets homepage displays recent tweets on a Google Map that are pulled in from the microsite's three 'communities'. The communities display a real-time stream of tweets in the categories of Inspiration, Giving and Prius.


They also have given the credit to Federated Media who built this platform. Federated Media (FM) is a next generation media and publishing company that connects the highest-quality conversational content with leading brand marketers. FM represents more than 100 of the world’s most respected websites, blogs, and social networking applications. With a unique combination of quality, safety and scale, FM leverages deep, long-term relationships with brand marketers and advertising agencies to create cost effective and meaningful media and marketing executions. Learn more at www.federatedmedia.net.

Time Consumer Spending with Media

I just have reviewed the recent research paper from Forrester about Consumer Online Behavior that are some interesting points as following.

- While the 18-29 year old set spends the most time online (although by just 2 hours per week over the 18-43 year old set) the type of usage varies greatly.

- Overall the usage of the various media is steadying over the past 5 years with the largest change happening on the Internet. If you are the newspaper, radio or magazine business, though, the term ’steadying’ may need to be replaced with the word ‘disconcerting

- The Internet is mostly an extension of what someone is / or does offline. If you watch a lot of TV offline you are either moving from the couch to the desktop or maybe you’re just too lazy and you are putting your laptop on your lap on the couch but guess what you are doing either way: watching TV.

- Social networking isn’t just for Gen Yers anymore. Double-digit growth numbers for the use of online social networking sites proves that the phenomenon has moved well beyond the realm of college students.

Finally Microsoft & Yahoo! agree on search platform partnership

Yesterday (Wednesday) it is another big day of Internet Industry as Microsoft & Yahoo set up conference call to announce the deal. It is 10-year deal gives Microsoft its best shot yet to show its new search technology, Bing, is as good as or better than Google's. Microsoft also hopes to use Yahoo to divert sales from Google, which generates more than $20 billion a year from ads. During the first five years of the deal, Yahoo! will get to keep 88-percent of the ad revenue from its own search sites and will be able to sell ads on certain Microsoft Web sites, as well, becoming the exclusive force behind Microsoft's advertising sales initiatives.

For this deal , Microsoft will gain access to Yahoo's audience would instantly more than triple Bing's U.S. market share to 28 percent. That's still a far from the remarkable 65 percent of U.S. searches handled by Google, according to the research firm comScore Inc.

This deal will make the cons to Yahoo as Yahoo will have limited access to the data on users' searches, which yield insights that can be used to pick out ads more likely to pique a person's interest. The value of that information is why Microsoft wants to process more search requests.

You can also view what will be about Yahoo Deal overview shown below.

I also found funny logo about this search deal as well.

Online Shopping in Facebook

Today I have found the creativity idea of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM which set up the store front page in Special Offer page in Facebook. If you are not the Fan yet, it will look like this image that you can see only feature product and leads to their website.

Then, I click to become a Fan of 1-800-Flowers.com , then I see the page has been changed to this .

That's cool! That we can interact to product without leaving facebook. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM has teamed up with ad network / app developer Alvenda to bring its store to a potentially massive audience on Facebook (although only some 1530 people have become a fan of the florist shop’s Page so far).

Twitter 101 Special Guide for Business

Today Twitter has unveiled Twitter 101 (A Special Guide) that explain what Twitter is and how businesses can use it, along with case studies of a few companies that use Twitter. They show Dell, Jetblue, Pepsi, etc. as case study about how to adapt Twitter to communicate with customers and generate sale from Twitter post. Also they have Best Pratice for marketers as well. Let's check it out full information at here : http://business.twitter.com/twitter101

Basic differences in perceptions of online media by men and women

There are some interesting about perception from Men and Women of the social media and online media consumption. I have found some interesting information as following.

- Men on Twitter would always write a statement. Women have a larger tendency to ask a question or to convey a feeling that draws empathy or compassion.

- 63 per cent of Facebook users are men, with a growing membership of women, aged above 55.

- Andrew Robertson of BBDO said there are three fundamental differences between men and women. Men are more about scoring, fantasy and destination. "This is why, men enjoy online games much more than women. In fact, 84 per cent of virtual reality players are men."

- 63 per cent of women in the UK complain that men spend too much time playing online games.

- Women are about relationships, reality and journeys. They are more interested in checking emails, interacting with friends and family members and blogging. Twenty-five per cent of women said blogs have reduced the time they spend on reading magazines. More women post profile pictures on Facebook with friends

Search is key for travel planning.

I just read " "The Traveler's Road to Decision," released from Google and OTX on Tuesday, there are some interesting point that I would summarize as following.

- Business travelers are more likely to seek out money-saving packages, access travel sites from their mobile phone, and become a rewards travel program member.

- 25% of business travelers are more likely to access information on their phone, and 83% of business travelers belong to a rewards program.

- Most Search advertisers still don't share the message of specific rewards programs in search campaign yet.

- Google found research to booking could stretch as far as 18.1 weeks on average. That's when more generic phrases are searched on.

- Consumers rely on search engines throughout the trip-planning process more so than travel search sites

- When consumers looking information about hotels, 81% rely on search engines when looking for business overnight accommodations vs. 67% personal; 74% business air travel vs. 59%; 60% destinations vs. 59% personal; and 51% vacation activities vs. 55% personal.

- Travel videos have also become important as people plan trips.

Online video is used through the entire planning process

I really love video , always watch it daily. It make me feel relax , not reading entire of day!

Travel videos have also become important as people plan trips. YouTube as the most popular site for videos on both business and leisure travel. Video helps people to visualize the surroundings and make better choices on where to stay and what to do. Also it created by peers are looked upon as being more trusted, compared with the videos that companies create to peddle goods and services. Online video is used through the entire planning process. When thinking about taking a trip, 63% of people turn to videos for personal travel vs. 66% for business; 47% and 56% when thinking about what type of trip to take; 60% and 64% when choosing a destination; 64% and 66% when looking for activity ideas; and 57% and 66% when deciding on accommodations and transportation, respectively. It all process that people decide where to go , what to do and where to stay. As social network and user generate content become more trustworthy source of content, people believe it!

Amazon to acquire Zappos.com for $847 Million

Wow, that's cool!. Amazon announced today to acquire apparel and footwear retailer Zappos.com for $847 Millon. Zappos, the popular online retailer ranked 3rd last week among online retailers within the Apparel and Accessories category behind Victoria’s Secret and Old Navy. Both Amazon and Zappos.com are well-known for the breadth of product offerings, so it is not surprising that they share much of their audiences. The deal would be the most expensive purchase in Amazon's recent history, according to FactSet Research. Amazon's priciest acquisition this decade was Audible Inc. - which provided audio editions of books and newspapers - for $ 280.7 million cash in early 2008, according to FactSet.



Zappos is one of company that utilize huge effort to social media that they make their customers feel warms, I think Amazon may adapt and utilize from those channels as well.

The target group of Amazon & Zappos is nearly same target that you can see figure above.

70-75 year old age bracket is one of the fastest-growing segments of the online population

It quite interesting to develop some market to senior citizens in USA. The 70-75 year old age bracket is one of the fastest-growing segments of the online population, according to the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life. In 2005, 25 percent of them used the Internet. Last year, 45 percent went online. Older surfers use the Web primarily for searches for things such as health information, e-mail, and buying products.

2.2 billion - Global Internet Population by 2013

I just found the new research from Forrester about projection of the Internet population will hit 2.2 billion people by 2013. Of that tally, 43 percent of the Internet population will be in Asia. There are some interesting points in the the research paper as following.

• 17 percent of the online population will reside in China. Tha'ts really big market. The search engine war between Baidu VS Google.
• Growth rates in the U.S., Western Europe and other industrialized nations will be between 1 percent and 3 percent.
• Online penetration in the U.S. will rise to 82 percent in 2013, up from 73 percent. That rate will put it on par with other Internet saturated countries. • Russia and Turkey growth will grow 8 percent a year.
• Africa and the Middle East will show strong growth to hit 13 percent of the online population in 2013.

Search continues to lead interactive spend followed by display.

I have just read about the trend report from Forrester about Interactive Marketing industry will reach $55 Billion dollars, There are some interesting point as following.

- Search continues to lead interactive spend followed by display.

- Social media assets (like internal blogs, community sites) are really the only emerging media getting traction in today's economic climate.

But anyway overall advertising budgets will decline. With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.

Google Analytics Individual Qualification Test

Finally I have a chance to take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Test today. It quite good to have it. The questions which has in exam about 70 questions. That's take about 90 minutes. After that you will get the certificate like this immediately. It will valid only 18 months. Oh that need to re take an exam again!

Google Revenue Second Quarter 2009

Google reported revenues of $5.52 billion in the second quarter of 2009, representing a 3% increase over second quarter 2008 revenues of $5.37 billion.

Google Sites Revenues – Google-owned sites generated revenues of $3.65 billion, or 66% of total revenues, in the second quarter of 2009. This represents a 3% increase over second quarter 2008 revenues of $3.53 billion.

Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $1.68 billion, or 31% of total revenues, in the second quarter of 2009. This represents a 2% increase from second quarter 2008 network revenues of $1.66 billion.

International Revenues – Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $2.91 billion, representing 53% of total revenues in the second quarter of 2009, compared to 52% in the first quarter of 2009 and second quarter of 2008.

Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $715 million, representing 13% of revenues in the second quarter of 2009, compared to 14% in the second quarter of 2008.

Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of AdSense partners, increased approximately 15% over the second quarter of 2008 and decreased approximately 2% over the first quarter of 2009.

Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of AdSense partners, decreased approximately 13% over the second quarter of 2008 and increased approximately 5% over the first quarter of 2009.

TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, decreased to $1.45 billion in the second quarter of 2009, compared to TAC of $1.47 billion in the second quarter of 2008 TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 27% in the second quarter of 2009, compared to 28% in the second quarter of 2008.

The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.24 billion in the second quarter of 2009. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $218 million in the second quarter of 2009.

Elle(21 years), Power Girl in Youtube!

Elle becomes the powerful girl in Youtube and Social Network now that she build the great community via Youtube and other social network sites. She now got almost 3 Million Channel Views with more than 64,o00 Subscribers in her channel. Elle , 21 years old running her own Beauty Channel that cover the makeup tutorials, hauls , tips and tricks and video blogs. This below is info from her profile. She uses many ways to connect with her target group to get update information via Facebook and Twitter. She has more than 11,500 followers in Twitter account. She also running the contest via her channel as well.

This kind of thing is really interesting and you can see how powerful if we use it in the right way.

Let's check it out here youtube here : http://www.youtube.com/user/AllThatGlitters21

This is some figure that her channel quite performs very well,

#28 - Most Subscribed (All Time) - Gurus

#22 - Most Viewed (Today 15 July 2009) - Gurus

#94 - Most Viewed (Today Today 15 July 2009) - Partners

#26 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Gurus

#9 - Most Viewed (This Month) - Gurus

#69 - Most Viewed (This Month) - Partners

Facebook 250 Million Users Count Officially

It just 3 months ago that they annouce that Facebook user reach 200 million users, today (15 July 2009), Mark announce again that they got officially 250 millions. That's amazing 3 month, 50 million new users and back to January (6months and half) got 150 million, it means in 6 months period , they got new 100 million users worldwide. That's power of social network!

Let to continue follow the Twitter , this year, their annual growth more than 1164% comparing to facebook 248%

What Bill Gates said about Google Chrome OS?

Let come to see what Bill Gates said about Google Chrome, which he just recently interviewed with CNET.

"There's many, many forms of Linux operating systems out there and packaged in different ways and booted in different ways,"

"In some ways I am surprised people are acting like there's something new. I mean, you've got Android running on Netbooks. It's got a browser in it."

Gates said it was hard to really say much about Chrome OS, since Google has said so little about how it will actually work.
"The more vague they are, the more interesting it is," he said.

Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates also stressed the fact that Google now has two operating systems--Chrome OS and Android. Steve Ballmer noted that Microsoft learned with the separate Windows 95 for consumers and Windows NT for businesses that having two operating systems isn't necessarily a positive thing.

Huge Growth of Bing

In one of the latest reports by Hitwise for search engine share data, Bing showed significant growth almost every week. You can also see data from different source which also claim huge growth of Bing as well.

U.S. Core Search Share, June 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)

Google	65.0%	0.0% m/m	+3.5% y.y
Yahoo	19.6%	-0.5% m/m	-1.3% y/y
Bing	8.4%	+0.4% m/m	-0.8% y/y
AOL	3.1%	+0.04% m/m	-1.0% y/y
Ask	3.9%	+0.03% m/m	-0.4% y/y

In Addition, Bing Maps (Bing.com/Maps), now become the top 20 travel website rank which recorded by Hitwise (June) which jump from #7629 in May 2009, to #17 now.

How to create Link Bait with Widget?

Link Builing is important for SEO and there is major impact of getting rank well. There is also less important of Reciprocal Links and also No-Follow Links still widely used (just recent news that Google now crawl the links even though it is no-follow or do-follow , they will judget on their own alogrithms not human control of linking method anymore). Link Baiting is one of popular techniques that make the large acquisition of links through word of mouth and quick spread throughout the blogs and niches website.

Today, I would recommend you to use Widget as Link Bait Strategy. Before you have widget , you have to thinking about these following.

- What is your target audience and what they are looking now?

- What function or information that can serve them and let them stay and get update of your information?

After that you will get the ideas what should be build for your targets. I would recommend you to start building widget from free website like http://www.widgetbox.com that you can also distribute through various channels.

There is some case study like Superpages widget that they got 22,000 links back from widget.

Post Digital Marketing 2009

I really love this awesome presentation, there are some great quotes that hit your heart about digital marketing and branding. There are some quotes that my favourite as following.

• "There is no real life and digital life" It's the same place.
• "a Brand is not a place, it's a direction"
• "Marketing is not about selling stuff, it's about giving the parcipant a reason to buy stuff"
• "the problem: if you think your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail."

That's so cool quotes, take a look more and get fun of it!

Vacation Ideas Website

This post, I would bring my experience and favourite on this website. I would just give you some website that help you plan your vacation from the scatch that you don't have any idea for the destination in your mind yet. This site is Tripbase.com , I really like the User Interface and their Data Mining system. There are some hightlight different points from other websites as following.

- Travel Habits Selection : Nightlife , Dining , Shopping, Nature, Attractions

- Departure's Base (Not Destination Base)

- You can set Budget and Type of Trip upon your need.

- Have information about Estimate Cost of Living, Average Hotel Price , Average Flight Price

- What is the best time to visit and What will expect to see in each month! That's cool!

Priceline & Ticketmaster Partnership

The big OTA player, Priceline has become the official travel partner with Ticketmaster. The partnership will bring special offers for airline, rental car and hotels through Priceline, allowing customers attending an out-of-town event to make travel arrangements while purchasing tickets to an event. Also, The exclusive partnership allows Ticketmaster, a unit of Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., to provide customers various hotel, airline and rental car offers from Priceline.com. Ticketmaster estimates that 20-30 percent of an event's audience is from out of town.

This is interesting point that they mention to expand internationally that first market that I guess, will be UK that now the existing big player is Lastminute.com (Division of Travelocity) , direct competitor of Priceline. From my opinion, They might use Ticketmaster to integrate with Booking.com (which is leading online travel agency) which own by Priceline to compete with local players there.

Review : Cyber Grand Prix (Cannes Lions 2009)

You will not surprise who will be the winner of this year Cannes Lion Awards for Digital Campaign. The winner of Cyber Grand Prix (Cannes Lions 2009) is Tourism Queensland: Best Job In The World , which every known about this campaign. Let's see what is details inside of this campaign.

Describe the brief from the client(Tourism Queensland)

The target audience were new customers, with a vague awareness of the Great Barrier Reef (and Australia), but no awareness of the islands. Our goal was to raise internationalawareness of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef (a new brand for Tourism Queensland) and transform a popular day-trip destination into an international tourist’s dream holiday. Classified press ads, a PR campaign, in-store posters, online recruitment listings and display ads worked together to drive traffic to the website. Visiting and engaging with the website would drive visitation to the islands in the long term.

Creative Execution:
The best aspect of ‘The Best Job in the World’ is its location, and although the generous salary is appealing, the real reward is in spending six months living above the reef and exploring the region. The ‘Best Job in the World’ idea was born out of the brand’s positioning – Life Above and provokes Global Experience Seekers to engage with a unique brand asset – the Great Barrier Reef. This would be one of the only integrated international recruitment campaigns, and the only recruitment campaign used to launch a tourism brand.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

We tapped into a universal desire and created a job that sounded too good to be true - anyone from anywhere in the world could apply. The Islands Caretaker role is a completely genuine employment opportunity within Tourism Queensland, living on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and reporting back to the world. To apply, candidates had to create a persuasive and entertaining video application demonstrating their knowledge of the region. Tourism Queensland wanted to achieve 14,000 application videos from 8 key markets, plus news coverage in mass media and popular social networking sites.

Describe the results in as much detail as possible.
No single tourism campaign (and potentially no single campaign) has ever had such a significant global reach across the spectrum of media and generated such a high volume and highly impassioned response from consumers. -34,684 applicants from 201* countries created 610 hours of video content which passionately promotes our product. - Over 450,000 votes for the Wild Card applicant. - In 56 days islandreefjob.com had 6,849,504 visits, 47,548,514 page views with an average of 8.62 minutes spent on the site. - Media coverage has been estimated at over $US100M from a campaign budget of $US1.2M.

*Value of media coverage estimated by Tourism Queensland, as at 19/3/09. **Web-coded countries (only 195 countries are recognised by the UN).

Interactive will reach 21% by 2014, Social Media is Biggest Growth!

I just read the recent research paper from Forrester Research about the growth of Interactive Marketing. There are some interesting points that I would brief as following.

- Marketers will not expand the marketing budget but will shift to interactive marketing, such as social media, mobile marketing, and search and e-mail marketing and display ads.

- The biggest growth area for interactive is expected to be social media. Social Media assets will be more than $3 Bilion USD

- Marketers will improve how they use social media to engage — not just reach — target audiences. This means more spend on multichannel social media campaigns instead of just buying banners on community sites

New Update : Google Chrome OS

Finally Google has updated officially that they launch new Operating system, they called "Google Chrome OS" . It will be open source which is lightweight operating system designed for netbooks. " Speed, Simplicity and security are key aspects of Google Chrome OS. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. That's really cool like Mac OS X that can work in GUI environment and command line. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications will be written using your favorite web technologies.

Chrome OS will run on x86-based PCs, as well as machines built around the ARM processor.

That's really interesting that they have separate project from Android. Google Chrome OS is built for people who spend most time on the web.

This will be impact the search engine market share for sure, as now Microsoft integrated all search channel to Bing.

How to set up PPC budget for a New Product?

If you're planning to launch the new marketing campaign, but you don't have any data about your KPIs? How do you set up the budget for you? You will have no idea what is Average Order Value(AOV), Close Rate(CR) Google Adwords just given you the bids and daily budget, but these are only guesses. In order to set up initiatl campaign budget for PPC , you need to calculate your Cost per lead (CPL), like this

1. Estimate the amount of revenue you expect to make in one month. You need to use minimum amount of revenue that you can stay in the business. Worst case scenario of estimation!

2. Guess at your close rate, for every 100 leads , how much you thinks that you can convert them into customers or transaction. 10% is quite fairly conservative. You will get better of number when you run a new product for a while.

3. Use your estimate close rate to estimate how many leads that you need to be breakeven or reach the minimum number of sales.

4. Calculate your target CPL . I think you talk with other people to get feedback and some comment what your thought.

5. Multiply the number of leads by the Target CPL . You will get how much you will have to spend per month to buy the leads you need.

For example, you want to sell 100 transaction per month. You have 50% close rate, you need 200 leds to sell 100 transactions. If the target CPL is $10 and you need 200 leads, you will need to spent about $2000 per month. Now, you got the idea what is PPC Budget for your new product.

ASCII Art in AdWords Ads

I am accidently found about ASCII Art in Google Adwords Ads, that's really cool! That created significant boosting in CTR. You may try this idea with your A/B testing to see whether it make you change in conversion or not!. Never tried never know. Do something creativity.

PepsiCo's Biggest Online Campaign

I got the recent news about PepsiCo appointed Microsoft to run the biggest ever online campaign, that's so exciting. The campaign will run for nine months and will initially include a Pepsi Max microsite in the UK, Norway and Australia targeting 18 to 25-year-old men.

They have aim to engage users with the brand by allowing them to share comments, games and photo galleries with friends on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, encouraging them to join Pepsi Max's Club.Microsoft's portal MSN will host specially created editorial content, which Microsoft has guaranteed will drive at least one million people to the micro site. Microsoft Advertising will also drive consumers to the microsite through ads around its MSN Messenger service. The Pepsi Max's "Club" microsite has been built and is being hosted using Microsoft technology.