Advertising - Broadcast TV Retains Marketing Dollars in Hard Times - NYTimes.com

Advertising - Broadcast TV Retains Marketing Dollars in Hard Times - NYTimes.com.

"It’s not because the four major broadcast networks are delivering more prime-time viewers to advertisers than they did last season; they are not. Cumulatively, they are down 10 percent in actual live viewers, with ABC, NBC and Fox all drawing around a million viewers less each night than they did last season. CBS is the one network that has improved from last season; the network is up 1 percent in viewership. Among the 18-to-49-year-old audience sought by advertisers, there are also declines. Both ABC and Fox are down 14 percent, while NBC is down 9 percent and CBS is down 3 percent."

Happy Holidays

Study: Young people watch less TV

Study: Young people watch less TV.

TV does remain the most influential advertising medium going, followed by magazines, the Internet, newspapers, radio and billboards. Social networking sites are considered separate from the rest of the Internet, and they are the seventh-most influential place to advertise, followed by in-theater ads, DVDs, blogs (again, distinct from the Internet), video games, mobile phones and virtual worlds.

Online Video Attention Spans

Recently, TubeMogul posted a study in which they tracked users' attention spans while watching online video. The results aren’t really surprising: Roughly 90% of people watch more than 10 seconds, while fewer than 10% will watch more than five minutes, which a fairly strait drop-off as you move between the two. Though there is a slightly larger dip once the one minute mark is passed.

However, I really want to know the breakdown of just what types of videos were being watched. As I wrote on my personal blog:

For the sake of argument, many on-line videos are just images of something that (generally) regular people are doing. Dropping Mentos in Diet-Coke, someone’s kid doing something silly, high-school students left to their own devices with a camera… I, and I believe many people, just don’t have a high tolerance for any lengthy video in that category. I believe this is the reason for the rapid fall-off in the TubeMogul chart. Those videos just aren’t worth our attention when our time is finite.

[via conigs.com via korrejohnson]

Understanding Izea’s Sponsored Blogging Service

Jeremiah Owyang has a great, in depth analysis of the pay per blog work being done online, focusing on Izea and with quite a bit of analysis on the recent KMart work they've done.  There is a lot of great links here to other bloggers, articles and opinions on this rapidly emerging (and highly debated and controversial) space.  I personally think it's generally a bad idea, but Jeremiah is warming up to it, and he's no dummy.   

Thoughts?

Understanding Izea’s Sponsored Blogging Service.

What the f**k is social media?

Outside Line » Blog Archive » What the f**k is social media?.

What The F**K is Social Media?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing)

Thought for the morning: Every 10 days Facebook grows a Twitter. - FriendFeed

Just a short post (picked up from Robert Scoble's Twitter Feed) for today to get the thought processes going.  Facebook is currently adding 600,000 people a day.  Twitter has around 6 million users.  Which means:

Thought for the morning: Every 10 days Facebook grows a Twitter. - FriendFeed.

Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue

Venture Beat and Mashable report this week (via InternetNews) that through use of Twitter Dell has netted $1 Million in revenue.  Venture Beat and Mashable argue about the ability of Twitter to monetize their service, but the real story is that a large company is starting to see gains and benefits to participating intelligently in social media.  To Dell $1 Million is small potatoes - but given that it's just a family of Twitter Feeds (found here) that's a pretty nice number.  Also - it's definitely a cool million that they didn't have before. 

Other notable companies use Twitter for marketing purposes as well (see Tesla Motors).  Companies are finding that through a re-purposing of Twitter, a service originally intended as (and still used primarily) a user to user communication platform, they can reach out to their prospective customers. 

This works for two reasons:  First, the companies, such as Tesla, can build a community of followers.  By communicating and arming this core group of followers companies are basically recruiting and cultivating their own unpaid sales force. 

In the case of Dell's budding Twitter success, the company is allowing that same core group streamlined access to sales and promotions.  If I'm interested in buying a Dell laptop a Twitter feed allows me to effortlessly track and participate in those sales. 

(Venture Beat, Mashable, and InternetNews)

The Empire uses Social Media why don't you.

Facebook Connect

A couple of months ago Facebook rolled out a new application/service, Facebook Connect.  Earlier this month, all over the interwebs, things got much more official.

It's definitely an intriguing development.  The movement to allow Facebook users to participate with their favorite blogs and websites through the Facebook interface has been steadily growing since then with Tech Blog Giant Gizmodo jumped on the bandwagon today.

The marketing advantages are pretty clear for sites like Gizmodo, after all, the hassle of participation within their community has seriously declined (if you use facebook in the first place).  Also, the content goes both ways - so if I like a story on Gizmodo - I can now share it with all of my friends on Facebook even more easily.  This means more views for the blog.  More views for Gizmodo equals more revenue.  The larger the community that Gizmodo can guarantee it has, the easier it is to prove to potential advertisers that there will be a measurable return on investment.

For Gizmodo this is a win win situation - they've arguably just added 130 Million people to their community (either direct Gizmodo users or those user's friends).

130 Million more people....  That's a ton of ROI even if only half of those people ever see a Gizmodo story posted in one of their friends Facebook profiles.