Marketing Pilgrim

It appears Twitter is finally had enough of third-party analytics companies getting all of the publicity over tweet counts–so it’s spilling the official beans.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

I may have to admit to contributing maybe half that number on some days.

After years of debate and experimentation, the New York Times announced its decision of a pay-meter system last month. Although the switch isn’t due for more than a year, we’ve all had our questions. Last week, executives of the Times took the opportunity at the paidContent conference to answer those questions.

Unfortunately, it looks like they’re not all on the same page, especially when it comes to the many popular blogs hosted by the Times. Reports Felix Salmon of Reuters:

[Senior VP of Digital Operations Martin] Nisenholtz did say quite clearly that he expected ad revenue to go up rather than down, which implied to me that that paywall was going to be pretty porous. And [owner Arthur Sulzberger] said that “we are not trying to eliminate ourselves from the digital ecosystem”. But when I asked about specifics, it all got rather messy. It started when I asked whether the NYT’s own blogs would be counted towards the quota, and Nisenholtz replied that “our intention is to keep blogs behind the wall”.

People may be more honest on Facebook these days, but we still don’t trust them. MediaPost reports that an ARAnet study shows social media and search engine recommendations coming out tied among the general population—but search engine recommendations leap out in front among affluent (>$75,000/yr—49%) and younger adults (25-34—50% vs. 31% for social media).

However, the general consensus was that personal advice from friends or family members was tops, with 59% rating it as important in influencing their buying decisions. But to me, that sounds like a completely different dynamic—are we supposed to be measuring the influence of people we know vs. strangers vs. corporate messages, or are we measuring what medium is more influential? If your mom delivers her advice via your Facebook wall, are you less likely to take it than if she told you in a phone call? Is it surprising that most people trust people they know, who know them and their preferences, than random strangers on search engines or social networks?

Some more Monday morning research for you to consider while getting back into work mode. A report from Millward Brown takes a look at the top trusted brands in the US based on trust and recommendation. These factors are combined into what the researchers call “TrustR” which is a new metric for understanding and strengthening the bond between consumers and brands. In this day and age where trust is more elusive than ever since it appears that saying whatever needs to be said to get out of any situation is more than OK, we will need some measurement of a brand’s trust level.

So who are the big winners according to Millward Brown?

This number was arrived at by using the following formula

Advertising in general has had a soul crushing last couple of years. That’s not a surprise. Combine the rapid changes to how everyone communicates with the worst economy in quite some time and you have the perfect storm for advertising woes. The ones who have the greatest difficulty in these times are the local advertisers because they have limited cash flow and limited ability to keep up with rapid change.

Hopefully there is an end to this cycle sooner than later. A study conducted by BIA/Kelsey sees the rebound in local advertising overall but more importantly a significant shift to digital which could account for 25% of local ad spend by 2014. ClickZ gives us some more to consider

It appears as though the concept of being “radically transparent” is reaching the huddled masses on social networks.

Back in 2007, 31% of social network users admitted that they had falsified some of their profile details. Today, a new study suggests that we’re all actually quite honest about how we portray ourselves–at least, on Facebook.

Psychologists studied 236 US and German students and looked at how closely their real personalities matched up with their “idealized personalities”–who they’d like to be online. Apparently, the majority of the group didn’t play out their perfect persona, instead they were pretty transparent in who they were:

…there was no evidence of self-idealization, and ideal-self ratings did not predict observer impressions above and beyond actual personality