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30 Aug This post is from from my other blog here I recently participated in writing a research brief on marketing opportunities on social network sites (social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). Part of our research was to see what information we could find regarding popularity of social network sites worldwide as well as member population makeup, specifically social network population by age and gender. The research data I needed went far beyond my high-level post on social networks in February. Happily, we were able to find data that helped in our analysis without spending a dime. Global popularity of social network sites In research social networking site popularity, we came across a great blog post: “Modeling The Real Value of Social Networks“. The post by Michael Arrington (that appeared on his site TechCrunch) was focused on assigning a valuation social network sites. While I wasn’t interested in the valuation, the post leveraged data that was just what we were looking for to get a gauge on overall popularity: April 2008 comScore social network site data for their supported countries and regions. Interested? TechCrunch made the data available as a Google Docs spreadsheet: Member population: age and gender Another key piece of data we were trying to find was a breakdown of social network site members by age and gender. I was fairly confident that this data would be hard to come by, but some persistent Google searches turned up this gem: Two Rapleaf studies focused on that exact topic. The studies are biased towards the U.S. market, but the information is compelling and valuable nonetheless. Rapleaf’s commentary on how males and females differ in their usage of the social network sites is also interesting. Following links from these press releases will get you to data (some of it is provided right in the press releases also):
I hope this data helps in your social network research!
26 Aug This post is from from my other blog here If you’re an online marketer one of the sharpest tools in your toolbox is your analytics package. Once you’ve established goals for your site, built it to perform and have begun marketing it, analytics provides the most effective means of measuring your effectiveness. Non e-commerce web sites often measure their success based on the averages analytics tools provide. Does average page views per visit or average time spent on site sound familiar? If so, the video below is worth your time. In it web analytics professional Avinash Kaushik lectures on how averages can blind us from seeing the valuable data that can drive effective decision making. If you enjoy this video, consider Avinash’s book Web Analytics and Hour a Day, and add his web analytics blog to your feed reader.
26 Aug This post is from from my other blog here If you’re an online marketer one of the sharpest tools in your toolbox is your analytics package. Once you’ve established goals for your site, built it to perform and have begun marketing it, analytics provides the most effective means of measuring your effectiveness. Non e-commerce web sites often measure their success based on the averages analytics tools provide. Does average page views per visit or average time spent on site sound familiar? If so, the video below is worth your time. In it web analytics professional Avinash Kaushik lectures on how averages can blind us from seeing the valuable data that can drive effective decision making. If you enjoy this video, consider Avinash’s book Web Analytics and Hour a Day, and add his web analytics blog to your feed reader.
23 Aug This post is from from my other blog here Earlier this week I ran an experiment to validate a theory about Google giving preferential treatment to blog posting which contained video, essentially allowing those blog posts to rank for keywords and key phrases rapidly. The test which I published was for a new iPhone application called Dynolicious. You can read the entire experiment parameters and results in the original post, but I wanted to check-in and confirm that the rankings have maintained over time. Here are two Google screenshots taken this morning for one and two-word Google searches:
Evidence, but this test isn’t that compelling While the test did validate that the method has some merit, the terms which I selected are deep into niche territory and don’t receive substantial traffic. To further demonstrate the ability to achieve Google rankings in this manner I’ve run another test with an increased difficulty level. I’ll be publishing those results soon. Stay tuned.
22 Aug This post is from from my other blog here If you haven’t heard of Alltop you should give it a look. Alltop is a new approach to the organization and consumption of blog RSS feeds. Alltop displays the blog name and five most recent posts from blogs in each category it represents. Since Alltop is featuring hand-picked blogs the content is great. And, by visiting a single Alltop category you can cover top stories from a larger set of blogs as opposed to scanning multiple feeds in a feed reader. Here’s an example. This is the marketing page on Alltop: http://marketing.alltop.com/ Don’t like everything you see? If you prefer not to view a blog that is listed in a category, you simply delete it by clicking the “x” beside the name of the blog (there is an option to restore the page so it displays everything in a category). Yes, Online Marketing Performance is listed on Alltop; it’s in the marketing catgory.
20 Aug This post is from from my other blog here Over the past week or so I’ve run a few test regarding syndication of video in blog postings and its effect on SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings. I’ve had fairly eye-opening results: The ability to easily achieve page 1 Google rankings. Here’s an overview of one of my latest experiments: Hypothesis: Google is giving preferential treatment to blog posts with video syndicated from a Google video sharing site (Google Video or YouTube). Experiment: Post reasonably well crafted blog posts with relevant embedded video and monitor keywords and keyphrases to see if ranking could be achieved. Prediction: Page 1 Google SERP listings in less than a day for targeted keyphrases. Blog/Video/Post Details:
Results: This is the third test I’ve personally run and I’ve had the same remarkable result. When searching Google for targeted keywords and keyphrases:
Timeline to Page 1 on Google (Test date: 19 August 2008):
Some of these screenshots (below) are from my iPhone as I left the office right after I posted the video. I was unfortunately in that meeting for a few hours, so I’m not sure exactly when the results moved onto page 1. When searching Google from the iPhone I was using the Safari web browser and the same Google site (not the Google Mobile Search site or the Google Search App for the iPhone).
The iPhone screenshots have the time from the phone on them. For the other screenshots I’m relying on my Mac’s finder to get the “Date Modified” time. The only thing I’ve done to these pictures is blurred my email account as I was logged into Google when a few of the screenshots were taken (being logged in to Google had no effect either way in case you were curious). This technique has ...
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