Marketing Pilgrim

Since Andy is such an NC State fan it’s only fitting that the school would be involved in the social media learning curve. Social media is about communication first and foremost but it is literally changing the rules of communication for some traditional organizations and in this case it’s the NCAA.

As reported in the Raleigh News & Observer, there is a very hot recruiting battle going on for John Wall who is ranked as the number 1 high school senior basketball player in the country according to rivals.com. Wall attends Raleigh Word of God high school right in Raleigh so naturally the NC State fan base would love to see one of their own stay home and help NC State become a national power in basketball. While the fan base would certainly love that so would the university considering the revenue that can be generated via advertising and more. Add to it that the local competition is none other than newly crowned national champion North Carolina and the ever present Duke University then it becomes pretty critical to State to bring a phenom like this on board.

We have all heard about Twitter and Dell. A customer service coup of sorts that jacked up sales with a claim in December of ’08 that $ 1 million in sales could be contributed to Twitter efforts. Not bad for an investment involving employee time and probably little working capital As would be expected, other companies are now jumping on the bandwagon to provide an avenue of service that was for the most part unattainable in the very recent past.

Qwest Communications is taking this approach as noted over at MediaPost. The @TalktoQwest is monitored by 7 employees (or company reps as the article states which makes one wonder are they real Qwest employees?) 24 / 7and is designed to help aid customers in near real time regarding services like high-speed Internet, billing, pricing, technical support, and more.

Hot on the heels of their Click-to-Buy expansion (not to mention some gloomy revenue forecasts), YouTube announces its latest venture: a new, jointly-owned site from the video giant and Universal Music Group, to be titled Vevo.

Launching in the coming months, Vevo will also integrate with YouTube as a “new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player,” according to AllThingsD. Peter Kafka also points out that this is a win-win for the two media companies:

YouTube, which dominates the market for Web video but can only sell ads against a small portion of the clips it shows, gets to hang on to valuable, advertiser-friendly inventory.

If you were making money off 9% of your inventory, how long could you stay in business? A lot longer if you had someone with pockets as deep as Google’s backing you, eh? According to Ad Age, Google is selling ads against 9% of its US video views—and while that figure sounds rather unimpressive, it constitutes at 50% increase over last year’s figure, 6%.

Yes, in the 2008 annual report, Google admitted that it still “has yet to realize significant revenue benefits” from the $1.65B video site, even though it’s by far the most popular video destination on the Internet. Some recent studies suggest YouTube stands to lose $470M this year. As Ad Age puts it, YouTube is still “Google’s toughest sell to advertisers.”

While the news that Google is the search engine of choice by far is not ‘new’, it still amazes to hear that their lead is increasing. The increase year over year was 8% while there was a slight increase in the March ’09 over the February ’09 numbers. Google gets about 72% of the searches performed in the US.

Hitwise reports that Google’s gains are certainly coming at the expense of their major competitors. Yahoo year over year was down 19% and Live Search was down 17%. Love’em or hate’em Google sure is not showing signs of giving up its stranglehold on the search marketing industry. With this kind of data it’s no wonder that Yahoo is looking to shop its search business and venture into more social media plays.

Yahoo is still lurking about. A Reuters article gives a peek into what the folks at the perpetual Google chaser are doing to try to harness the large number of visitors it gets on a monthly basis to its disparate properties. These properties often work well on their own but don’t play well with other Yahoo properties and are in effect islands unto themselves.

Many of Yahoo’s properties rank among the most popular on the Internet. Yahoo’s homepage had 329 million unique visitors in February, according to research company comScore; Yahoo Mail had 282 million unique visitors in February, second to Microsoft HotMail.