Marketing Pilgrim

A survey from Association of National Advertisers (ANA), BtoB Magazine and ‘mktg’ indicates that marketers are turning to viral videos and social media marketing more and more, despite continued reservations.

Two-thirds of marketers surveyed said they were using SMM, up from only 20% of marketers in the 2007 survey. The most popular social sites for marketers were Facebook (74%), YouTube (65%), Twitter (63%), and LinkedIn (60%). Only a quarter of marketers were using viral video in 2007; now half are using this tactic. But marketers are concerned about how effective these techniques are:

Despite the growing use of social networks and viral videos, marketers do not think they are using these media in the most effective ways and are still struggling with measurement and media-mix allocation issues. The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are the inability to prove ROI (45%) and worries about not having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media (43%).

Efficient Frontier is taking yet another look at Bing’s usage stats—and yet again, they’re up. As of the first week in August, Bing’s click share has grown 45 percentage points since the beginning of June.

Bing has been working to target travel and shopping as a “decision engine.” Efficient Frontier reports that this seems to be working pretty well, at least in the travel category, with an 11% (though I think they might mean “11 percentage points”) click share lift. The finance category has also been a boon to Bing, with 22% click share lift.

EF postulates that maybe the Bingahoo announcement brought searchers wondering about the deal and the companies’ financial fortunes. Yahoo has traditionally been the most popular finance site on the Internet, and this bump for Bing probably isn’t going to challenge it. But are they going to maintain two separate sites, or is that going to be too much competition between the two now-allies?

Depending on who you listen to the Facebook Lite offering that was inadvertently sent to many Facebook users is everything from a direct frontal assault on Twitter to a speed enhancer. Since this product was not even supposed to be released as it was it may not really matter what it really is because it’s not really ready to even ‘be’ quite yet. Two takes came from Mashable and TechCrunch and they are very different.

Mashable’s take can be summed up as follows

It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitterstream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.

Everyone wants to figure out who has this social media thing figured out. One of the things that gets attention in a hyper covered area like social media is saying something contrary to what appears to be the conventional wisdom. In the UK, we have heard from 15 year ‘analysts’ and now we hear from the UK media regulator, Ofcom that social networking use is down. The Ofcom site defines them as the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services. Their findings as reported by ClickZ states

It’s been a little over a year since Google launched Google Knol. Now it appears the service may not make it to its 2nd birthday.

As spotted by TechCrunch, traffic to the site peaked in February and has been on a downward slide since then.

It’s not the first time that we’ve seen questions asked about the futile contuation of Google Knol. In fact, it was just this past January that SAI asked why Google didn’t kill off Knol along with all the other dead weight.

It seems that even Knol users have become disenchanted with the service–resorting to using Knol as Craigslist classifieds alternative.

What about you? Are you still using Google Knol? Having any success?

If Facebook follows through on its announcement, it may soon ban all commercial activity in personal profiles.

Buried among many proposed changes to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR) you’ll find the following suggested addition:

You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).

While TechCrunch points out that this would prevent users from accepting payment in return for advertisements posted to their update status, it may go well beyond that. Let’s look at the sentence again, but with some highlighting:

You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).