Internet

On Facebook, A Wal-Mart Employee Is More Valuable Than A Goldman Sachs Employee

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-ads-2010-6

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In the real world, using salary as a measure, a Goldman Sachs staffer is worth much more than a Wal-Mart employee. An average Goldman Sachs employee is paid a bonus of $500,000, while the average Wal-Mart employee salary is $20,000.

On Facebook, the opposite is true. In the eyes of an advertiser, a Wal-Mart employee is worth nearly twice as much as a Goldman employee, according to Facebook’s suggested advertising bid prices.

Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat looked at Facebook’s suggested advertiser bid price on per category basis. What she found is pretty interesting. 

As you can see in this chart, the most expensive company to target is Facebook. The next most expensive is Wal-Mart. Goldman and Bain employees are duking it out for the cheapest.

chart of the day, suggested bids to reach facebook users employees of companies, june 2010

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Monday, July 5th, 2010 news 1 Comment

3 in 5 Web Users Read Online Newspapers

Source: http://feeds.marketingcharts.com/~r/marketingcharts/~3/-Sa6RZtikDw/

Almost three in five US internet users read newspapers online each month, according to comScore Media Metrix data.

57% of Web Audience Read Online Paper in May Online newspapers received about 123.9 million unique US visitors in May 2010, or roughly 57% of the total monthly US unique internet audience of about 215.7 million users. Those visitors [...]<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marketingcharts/~4/-Sa6RZtikDw" height="1" width="1"/>

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Monday, June 21st, 2010 news No Comments

Twitter gains mass awareness but usage remains light

AWARENESS

2010 – 87% awareness

2009 – 24% awareness

2008 – 5% awareness

USAGE

2010

- 1,500 million pageviews per month (71 pageviews per month avg)

- 162 million visits per month (8 visits per month avg)

- 21 million unique visitors per month

Arbitron Figures

2010 – 7% active users (use at least once per month)

2009 – 2% active users

Source: http://www.digidaydaily.com/stories/digital-content-today-arbitron-posts-twitter-numbers

Digital Content Today: Arbitron Posts Twitter Numbers

Media usage tracking company is reporting some surprising numbers on Twitter usage. According to a report in RadioInk, a webinar fromArbitron/Edison Research revealed that 87% of Americans are now aware of Twitter, up from 24% in 2009 and just 5% when the question was first asked, in 2008. But in looking at how many Americans are active users of Twitter — defined as using the service at least once a month — that figure came in at 7%, or about 17 million people, up from 2% in 2009.

Those are huge numbers to be sure, but less that what the blogosphere and assumed ubiquity of Twitter actually seems to be. Edison VP/Strategy & Marketing Tom Webster said awareness of Twitter has soared over a very short period. Webster compared Twitter usage to that of Facebook, the “10-ton gorilla” of social networking, with about six times as many users as Twitter although awareness of the services is roughly equal, and said, “Given that awareness per se is not a constraint, I think the smartest thing you can say about this particular graph is that Twitter has yet to articulate its value to mainstream Americans.”

Arbiron/Edson says that 18% of active Twitter users access the service several times a day and 15 % report they use it at least once a day, while 22% say they’re on Twitter at least once a month. But more than half — 53% — of active Twitter users don’t post tweets themselves and are instead, Webster said, “driven to go there as consumers of broadcast content.”

Other data:
•    About 51 % of active Twitter users are white, 24% are African American — about twice the percentage of African Americans in the general population. The study speculated that African Americans may use Twitter more “conversationally” than other users.
•    About 19% saying they’re “among the first” to buy or try new products, compared to 10 % of the population as a whole. 25% say they buy or try products before others, but not first.
•    They’re also inclined to access the Internet from several locations, and 63% access social networking from a mobile phone, compared to 35 % of all social-network users. And for Twitter users, Webster said, SMS is “pretty much like oxygen”: 92% use SMS, and 73% text multiple times a day.
•    About 42% of monthly Twitter users say they use the service to learn about products and services, and 41% use it to post their own opinions about products, while 31 % seek others’ opinions.

Active Twitter users report spending four hours a day online, compared to about two hours for the general population. But, Webster noted, “the other media here aren’t proportionately lower.” Twitterers spend two hours, 41 minutes a day with radio, compared to two hours, five minutes for the general population, and they spend three hours, 22 minutes with TV, compared to three hours, 25 minutes.

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Monday, May 3rd, 2010 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Inbound Marketing Costs Less than Outbound Marketing; Growing in Importance too

Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/inbound-marketing-costs-less-12762

hubspot2 logo5 Inbound Marketing Costs Less than Outbound Marketing; Growing in Importance too

Marketers who spend more than 50% of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing channels report a significantly lower cost per sales lead than those who spend 50% or more their budgets on outbound marketing channels, according to the “State of Inbound Marketing Report” [pdf] from internet marketing firm Hubspot.

Average Cost Per Lead $200 Less
The average cost per lead by inbound marketing-dominated firms in 2010 is $134. This is $198, or 60%, less than the $332 average cost per lead at outbound marketing-dominated firms. This percentage differential has remained consistent from a 61% higher average lead generation expense reported by outbound-marketing-dominated firms in 2009.

3 of 4 Major Inbound Channels Cost Less
When asked to rank each lead generation category as “below average cost,” “near average cost,” or “above average cost,” businesses consistently ranked inbound marketing channels as having lower cost than outbound channels. Only PPC (pay-per-click search) had overall cost rankings comparable to those given outbound channels.

hubspot inbound channel cost apr 2010 Inbound Marketing Costs Less than Outbound Marketing; Growing in Importance too

Social media and blogs had the highest “below average cost” rankings for both 2009 and 2010 (55% as a combined category in 2009 and 63% separately in 2010).

Trade shows, with their requirements for travel and expenses, as well as space rental and booth setup/removal for companies who exhibit, had the worst cost rankings in 2009 and 2010. In 2009, 55% of companies said trade show costs were above average and only 18% said they were below average. These figures improved moderately in 2010 (48% and 22%, respectively), but still left trade shows as clearly the least cost-effective marketing channel.

hubspot outbound channel cost apr 2010 Inbound Marketing Costs Less than Outbound Marketing; Growing in Importance too

Inbound Marketing Grows in Importance
Inbound marketing is continuing to grow in importance at the expense of outbound marketing, according to other findings from the State of Inbound Marketing Report.

As a percentage of the overall lead generation budget, inbound marketing expanded slightly from 2009 to 2010 (38% to 39%), while outbound marketing contracted more significantly (29% to 24%). The net effect is that the gap widened from inbound marketing, which had a 9% greater share of the overall marketing budget than outbound marketing in 2009, to a 15% greater share in 2010. Roughly one-third of the lead generation budget is considered “not classified.”

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Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 Uncategorized 2 Comments

TV Ad Revenues Drop 12% Online ad revenues grew 8% from 2008 to 2009

With the greater efficiencies of digital, the overall “pie” will shrink because fewer dollars are needed to achieve the same effect. In other terms — for every DOLLAR pulled out of traditional and general advertising, 20 – 50 CENTS is put back into “digital” channels and tactics. Thus the overall pie will continue to shrink while some parts grow and other parts shrink dramatically.

wasted ad dollars TV Ad Revenues Drop 12% Online ad revenues grew 8% from 2008 to 2009

Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/print/magazine-ad-revenues-pages-fall-in-q1-2010-12574

pib logo2 TV Ad Revenues Drop 12% Online ad revenues grew 8% from 2008 to 2009

Ad pages also declined in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009, falling 9.4%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB).

Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-ad-revenues-drop-12-12613/yankeegroup-media-averages-apr-2010jpg/

yankee group logo TV Ad Revenues Drop 12% Online ad revenues grew 8% from 2008 to 2009

Total US TV and online advertising revenues dropped 12% in 2009, although online revenues independently grew, according to research from The Yankee Group.

TV Revenue Decline Worse than Expected
In 2009, the total US TV and online advertising market totaled $67 billion, compared to $77 billion in 2008. TV advertising, by far the largest portion of this combined market, was hit especially hard by reductions in spending during 2009.

The TV ad market declined 21.2%, from $52 billion to $41 billion, between 2008 and 2009. This was significantly more than the 4% (or roughly $2.1 billion) decline The Yankee Group originally forecast in June 2009. As highlighted below, a shift in consumer attention primarily drove the steep decline in the TV ad market.

TV’s Loss is Internet’s Gain
Internet advertising grew during 2009, as a result of consumers spending more time online and less time watching TV. Online ad revenues grew 8.3% between 2008, when they totaled $24 billion, and 2009, when they totaled $26 billion.

yankeegroup media averages apr 2010 TV Ad Revenues Drop 12% Online ad revenues grew 8% from 2008 to 2009

Media Consumption Dwindles
The total amount of time consumers spent on media per day actually declined 14.3% between 2008 and 2009. Consumers spent about 14 hours per day on media in 2008, but only 12 hours per day in 2009. Most of the decline in media consumption was represented by declining TV viewership.

Americans spent an average of three hours and 17 minutes per day consuming TV and video in 2009, compared to an average of four hours and 13 minutes a day consuming online content. In addition, average daily mobile phone use reached one hour and 18 minutes. Thus Yankee Group advises marketers and advertisers to increase their focus on online and mobile promotions.

Annual US Ad Spending Falls 12.3%
Total US advertising expenditures (including print, radio, outdoor and free standing inserts) fell 12.3% in 2009, to $125.3 billion, as compared to 2008, according to Kantar Media.

Some of Kantar’s findings echo findings from the Yankee Group. Internet display advertising expenditures increased 7.3% for the year, aided by sharply higher spending from the telecom, factory auto and travel categories. Meanwhile, spot TV advertising fell 23.7%, Spanish language TV advertising dropped 8.9%, network TV fell advertising 7.6%, and cable TV advertising only fell 1.4%.

About the Data: Statistics are taken from the updated Yankee Group “2009 Anywhere Advertising Forecast.”

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Thursday, April 15th, 2010 news, statistics 1 Comment

Why your brand MUST have a presence on social networks

At first glance, I said false when I read “Brand Presence on Social Networks Trusted Almost As Much As Peer Advice” — but when I looked more closely, it read “most credible source for information about a brand.”  This is significant because a “brand itself” SHOULD be the most credible source of accurate and up-to-date information. Even consumers are not always the best source or always have the latest information. And further notice that “a marketer” is next to the last on the bottom. Consumers want accurate and up to date info but they do not want to be sold to.

Consumers are good for “subjective” input on the quality and value of a brand’s products or services. A brand must be responsible for the accuracy of its own objective information. Formerly a brand’s own website was the best place to house objective information such as technical specs, nutrition information, etc. While third party sites like reviews sites are the best place to house subjective information like customer reviews, etc. Today, since most customers frequent social networks and seldom visit brand’s websites (they never did much anyway) the place to put objective information is on brand pages on social networks. Note that this does not mean a marketing page designed to “sell.” It means place “credible information about a brand.”

Brands Vie for Credibility on Social Networks

APRIL 2, 2010

Asked what source was most believable when it came to information found about brands on social networking sites, Internet users were most likely to favor their peers. But “the brand itself” came in a close second, far ahead of journalists, considered traditionally to be an objective source. Notably, users were much less trusting of marketers—a separate response from brands—and didn’t put much faith in a brand’s competitors either.

brand information from brands Why your brand MUST have a presence on social networks

source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007608

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Monday, April 5th, 2010 Branding, social networks 1 Comment

Early reports show IE not faring well in the post-ballot screen days

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/22/early-reports-show-ie-not-faring-well-in-the-post-ballot-screen/

Early reports show IE not faring well in the post-ballot screen days

Most PC users hit the web using Internet Explorer by default, simply because that’s what came along with Windows. Now, after antitrust investigations, European users get a choice of browser to install via ballot screen, and initial reports are not good for ‘ol IE. According to Statcounter, IE use in France has dropped 2.5 percent since last month’s implementation of the ballot, 1.3 percent in Italy, and 1 percent in Britain. It’s still early days, and it’ll take more than this to chip away from IE’s 62 percent lead in the browser war, but it’s certainly not a good trend for Microsoft. With that in mind, we’re going to have to ask you to place your bets now.

Early reports show IE not faring well in the post-ballot screen days originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  post label source Early reports show IE not faring well in the post ballot screen daysReuters  | Email this | Comments

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Monday, March 22nd, 2010 Uncategorized, news No Comments

How Google Crunches All That Data

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5495097/how-google-crunches-all-that-data

500x datacenter How Google Crunches All That DataIf data centers are the brains of an information company, then Google is one of the brainiest there is. Though always evolving, it is, fundamentally, in the business of knowing everything. Here are some of the ways it stays sharp.

For tackling massive amounts of data, the main weapon in Google’s arsenal is MapReduce, a system developed by the company itself. Whereas other frameworks require a thoroughly tagged and rigorously organized database, MapReduce breaks the process down into simple steps, allowing it to deal with any type of data, which it distributes across a legion of machines.

Looking at MapReduce in 2008, Wired imagined the task of determining word frequency in Google Books. As its name would suggest, the MapReduce magic comes from two main steps: mapping and reducing.

The first of these, the mapping, is where MapReduce is unique. A master computer evaluates the request and then divvies it up into smaller, more manageable “sub-problems,” which are assigned to other computers. These sub-problems, in turn, may be divided up even further, depending on the complexity of the data set. In our example, the entirety of Google Books would be split, say, by author (but more likely by the order in which they were scanned, or something like that) and distributed to the worker computers.

Then the data is saved. To maximize efficiency, it remains on the worker computers’ local hard drives, as opposed to being sent, the whole petabyte-scale mess of it, back to some central location. Then comes the second central step: reduction. Other worker machines are assigned specifically to the task of grabbing the data from the computers that crunched it and paring it down to a format suitable for solving the problem at hand. In the Google Books example, this second set of machines would reduce and compile the processed data into lists of individual words and the frequency with which they appeared across Google’s digital library.

The finished product of the MapReduce system is, as Wired says, a “data set about your data,” one that has been crafted specifically to answer the initial question. In this case, the new data set would let you query any word and see how often it appeared in Google Books.

500x google data centers 4 How Google Crunches All That Data

MapReduce is one way in which Google manipulates its massive amounts of data, sorting and resorting it into different sets that reveal new meanings and have unique uses. But another Herculean task Google faces is dealing with data that’s not already on its machines. It’s one of the most daunting data sets of all: the internet.

Last month, Wired got a rare look at the “algorithm that rules the web,” and the gist of it is that there is no single, set algorithm. Rather, Google rules the internet by constantly refining its search technologies, charting new territories like social media and refining the ones in which users tread most often with personalized searches.

But of course it’s not just about matching the terms people search for to the web sites that contain them. Amit Singhal, a Google Search guru, explains, “you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”

Words are a finite data set. And you don’t need an entire data center to store them—a dictionary does just fine. But meaning is perhaps the most profound data set humanity has ever produced, and it’s one we’re charged with managing every day. Our own mental MapReduce probes for intent and scans for context, informing how we respond to the world around us.

In a sense, Google’s memory may be better than any one individual’s, and complex frameworks like MapReduce ensure that it will only continue to outpace us in that respect. But in terms of the capacity to process meaning, in all of its nuance, any one person could outperform all the machines in the Googleplex. For now, anyway. [Wired, Wikipedia, and Wired]

Image credit CNET

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 Uncategorized, news No Comments

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/VXZVXiFgV6Y/tableau-public-brings-your-boring-data-to-life

Windows only: Free application Tableau Public creates beautiful visualizations from your data and lets you publish them to the web, where users can interact with your charts and graphs with live updates.

The video above provides a great overview of how the tool works. Essentially, you import your data into the desktop Windows application, then play around with different charts, graphs, or other options until you find the visualization or visualizations that best fit your data. When you’re happy with what you’ve put together, you can save the outcome to the web, which uploads the charts to the Tableau Public servers. From there you can embed it on any web page YouTube-style), and users can drill down into the data to their heart’s content.

Here’s an example of Tableau Public in action from a post on the Wall Street Journal:

Dashboard at 570
Dashboard at 570

Tableau Public is a free download for Windows, and looks like a great tool to try out next time you’re looking to make your otherwise boring data come to life. Update: Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Tableau Public is only free on a trial basis; its actual price tag is extremely hefty. (Though if you’re a student you can get it for as little as $69.)

Double Update: Actually, looks like Tableau Public is free after all! Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“People can download the free tool and publish their visualizations of their data for free. Tableau Public includes a free desktop product that you can download and use to publish interactive data visualizations to the web. The Tableau Public desktop saves work to the Tableau Public web servers – nothing is saved locally on your computer. All data saved to Tableau Public will be accessible by everyone on the internet, so be sure to work only with [publicly] available (and appropriate) data.

When people want to analyze their private or confidential data (particularly data in data warehouses and other large databases), then they may want to consider our commercial products.”

Tableau Public [via MakeUseOf]

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Monday, March 8th, 2010 Uncategorized, news No Comments