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.