Marketing Pilgrim

Online retail sales are growing by all accounts—but, paradoxically, this is somehow translated as a negative for the industry, indicating that it’s “immature.”
Of course, there’s the good news:

Online retail sales in the United States jumped 23 percent, to US$28.4 billion, during the third quarter of this year compared with the same July-September period in 2006.

The retail surge was led by sales of video games, consoles and accessories, which showed a year-to-year increase of 199 percent.

And the not-so-good news (emphasis mine):

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InterActiveCorp, owners of such diverse properties as the Home Shopping Network, Evite, Match.com, TicketMaster, CitySearch and perennial favorite underdog search engine Ask.com, released their Q3 numbers today—and their total numbers aren’t so good:

Profit fell 4.2 percent. . . . Profit for the quarter ended Sept. 30 fell to $71.8 million, or 24 cents per share, from $74.9 million, or 24 cents per share, last year.

However, there is good news. Apparently, the home shopping industry is turning around! What? I know that you’re up watching those informercials at 3 AM.

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Halloween is a big holiday for spending. Reports that the figure is between $5-7 billion in spending and the average adult spends $65 on the holiday. Just ask Kate Maloney who at 26 made the Inc 500 list as founder and CEO of Costume Craze.

Here’s how Halloween spending breaks down: $21 for candy, $12 for cards and $38.50 for costumes (see this post on popular costumes for the season). Halloween decorating is also a big industry, second only to Christmas. Unity Marketing says decoration sales grew 21 percent to $3.2 billion in 2006 over 2005.

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By Manoj Jasra

Microsoft Corp. and SEMPO Institute, www.sempoinstitute.com, announced today an education alliance in which personnel from 20,000 affiliates of the MSN search engine will have access to SEMPO Institute’s online learning program designed to provide in-depth knowledge of best-practices in search engine marketing.

As part of the new alliance, personnel from the MSN affiliates will be able to take SEMPO Institute’s Fundamentals of Search Marketing class.  SEMPO Institute also offers online classes in Advanced Search Engine Optimization and Advanced Search Advertising.  Fundamentals consists of 14 lessons intended to give the student a high level understanding of the essentials of search engine marketing.

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MarketingSherpa just ran a great article on how to market yourself or business on Facebook. As they point out the approach to marketing in a social community takes a little different approach than marketing in other contexts. Offending the community means you won’t be trusted.

It goes like this. Imagine going to church and thinking that there are a lot of people in your potential market there. So you decide to make an announcement about a big sale at your store. Everyone feels uncomfortable. It’s happened to me and it was in bad taste.

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There’s a lot of waste in the computer industry. IBM has developed a solution that takes scrap silicon disks and makes them into solar panels.

Computer chips are made of silicon wafers that have to be perfect to be usable. Imperfect wafers are thrown away after sensitive data is removed. Now, with a new process by inventor Eric White, they can be reused and made into solar panels.

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Need help managing your Google reputation? Andy Beal offers Google reputation management consulting or buy his new online reputation management book.

Google is no longer just a search engine. With your potential customers, future employers, and members of the media turning to Google for information about your business, Google has become a reputation engine.

In helping clients with their online reputation, I’m consistently asked how they can push out negative results that appears on the first page of Google for a search for their name. Whether they were fined by the SEC, ridiculed by an ex-employee, or investigated by their local newspaper, they share one common goal: get that negative result off of the first page!

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Boo!

Yeah, I know, pretty lame. Consider that a warm-up for the deluge of kids that will be at your door tonight.

While you’re no doubt snacking on Halloween candy, here are some picks to digest:

• Facebook has registered a China ".cn" domain extension. Reuters turns that into a bunch of speculation.
• Google’s stock tops $700 for the first time. Both Calacanis and Sullivan take the credit for calling it.
• Ben Cook shares his humorous reasons why your blog might suck.
• SebastianX offers his idea for keeping Google’s paid-link police at arm’s length.

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I know that you’re a smart person. If you receive an email from PayPal or Bank of America, telling you they need you to verify your login details, you laugh, then hit delete. Right?

Not everyone is as smart as you, and in fact, there’s one person in particular that’s down about $10 million.

Techdirt is reporting an employee of Supervalu received email requests that appeared to be from two important suppliers; American Greetings and Frito-Lay. Both emails claimed that their bank account details had changed and that Supervalu would need to send funds to the new accounts. I’ll let Techdirt take it from here:

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Just days after Google apparently lost the opportunity to buy into Facebook to Microsoft, the company is expected to reveal details of its social networking master plan on Thursday. OpenSocial is a new set of standard APIs that will allow application developers to more easily build apps for social networks.

Google goal is to help shape the standards used between developers and social networks. Likely the move came from being shutout from Facebook. Not only did Google not get a piece of the social network, but Facebook uses a proprietary API that requires developers build apps specifically for it–sounds much like cell phone companies, doesn’t it?

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Now there is almost nothing left that you can’t buy entirely online. Autonation is the first to offer this service for buying a car completely over the internet. They are piloting a program that lets customers buy their car online in the Atlanta market with 14 dealerships.

Starting out, you enter your ZIP code, then using drop-down menus you can select a specific vehicle make and model and other features of the car. That includes choosing the color and packages. If you have a trade-in you can also use the used vehicle calculator to get a price for your car. When you and the dealer agree on a price, that figure is subtracted from the purchase price of your new car.

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Talk about creative workarounds. Spammers have found a way to crack captchas so they can steal your email address. As if the vice of spamming isn’t bad enough, they are using a virtual stripper named Melissa to get real people to unwittingly participate in their evil craft.

They created a game that is delivered via malware that is installed on your computer. When you launch Internet Explorer you are introduced to a game. In the game players are shown captchas (text embedded in an image), which are intended to stop computers from signing up for accounts like free email addresses. Each time they fill one out then a virtual woman takes off more of her clothes. Then spammers get their way and you get more junk mail.

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