Marketing Pilgrim

While we talk about the death of newspapers with great regularity it gets to be old news real quickly and even starts to feel a little mean. So to relieve that pressure eMarketer has come out with a report that is evidence of the decline and fall of another old friend, radio. Terresttrial radio is what we are talking about here. Good old fashioned over the airwaves kind of radio is heading in the same direction as newspapers which is sad but just another harsh reality of the shift in the media of the future. eMarketer tells us

The message coming from the radio industry is clear: Terrestrial radio is in trouble financially and things will get worse before they get any better. Many of the country’s largest national broadcasters are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) announced that Q1 2009 was the industry’s worst quarter ever in terms of ad spending.

Nielsen has been measuring television audiences for decades. Now online TV is starting to take over—but do we have accurate measurement of the online TV audience?

comScore and other online measurement companies are watching videos—I mean, online video audiences—grow and grow. Now Nielsen will use a new “Internet Meter” with its People Meter families to measure online as well as offline TV consumption.

The Internet Meter will measure the “extended screen”—online television from cable companies, such as OnDemand Online from Comcast and TV Everywhere from Time Warner. This type of viewing may have slipped past online measurement companies looking at web-based TV, like from Hulu. Nielsen has worked in online measurement as well, though they don’t say if they’ll be combining Hulu numbers with the online cable numbers.

When the company I worked for got into email marketing, the perfect day and time to send an email blast was the holy grail. Can’t send on Monday because people are digging out from the weekend. Can’t send on Friday because people are thinking about the weekend. Can’t send first thing in the morning because people are just getting into the rhythm of work and not ready to think about emails. Can’t send in the afternoon because people are shutting down for the day.

If you’re in the same place with your Facebook page, ViTrue’s Social Relationship Manager has that holy grail: data. And, as it turns out, some of the same logic about email scheduling applies on social networks: in terms of click through, Facebook wall posts are most effective in the middle of the week.

Perhaps even more important than when to post is when not to post: if you’re trying to get people to click, don’t post on Thursday, Friday or Saturday.

I’ve always maintained that it’s dangerous to take a single Marketing Pilgrim post and assume you understand our sentiment and bias towards any one company. If you read yesterday’s criticism of WordPress, you’d think we were “automattic” haters.

Today, you’d be eating humble pie.

Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides spell checking, style checking, and grammar checking. Huzzah!

While I’m somewhat puzzled that WordPress.com users get After the Deadline baked-in, while us .org user are left once again with just a plugin, I still applaud the acquisition. Why? Because spell checking and grammar checking are the bane of any blogger’s existence!

Companies that sell software to monitor your child’s online activity are double-dipping by selling the collected data to marketers, according to AP.

Not every software provider is engaging in the practice, but EchoMetrix Inc’s Sentry and FamilySafe brands are called out in particular. Because the software “listens” to the instant messenger conversations of kids, it’s able to package that information for marketers interested in learning of the latest trends of this young demographic. While this immediately sounds alarming, the companies claim there is no risk to the privacy of the children being monitored:

The company that sells the software insists it is not putting kids’ information at risk, since the program does not record children’s names or addresses. But the software knows how old they are because parents customize its features to be more or less permissive, depending on age.

Carl Icahn’s recent Yahoo stock dump didn’t cause too much alarm—although he took a $125M loss, he still retains 4.5% of the company (and his board seats). But now Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz looks like she’s dumping stocks—and investors are none too happy.

As The Guardian reports, when Carol Bartz took the helm, she was given a $1M salary and $5M in stock options, as well as a promise of a $4M bonus if things went well. In two sales during these last nine months, Bartz has already unloaded $2M in Yahoo stock options.

Not exactly a sign of confidence. Yahoo’s general counsel, Mark Callahan, has also sold of a significant portion of his shares—$1.35M in five sales this year, twice as much as last year. Because bad things come in threes, I guess.