Marketing Pilgrim

Buying ads on Facebook works!

According to Facebook.

OK, so the social network asked Nielsen to conduct the study, but I can’t help be somewhat skeptical of the results.

Me? Skeptical? Who knew?

The study looked at the brand recall of 800k Facebook users and ads from 14 different brands across a range of categories. The conclusion appears to be that Facebook ads can help increase brand awareness and recall, when combined with naturally occurring endorsements:

Facebook-home-page ads on average generated a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent..the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds.

In what is largely just a name change with a few new twists, Google has changed its Local Business Center to Google Places. It makes sense considering that an actual business listing in the Local Business Center was called a place page then why not clean things up a little, right?

Search Engine Land Reports

Google has decided to change the name of what was called the “Google Local Business Center” to “Google Places.” The rationale, according to the press release, is to better connect Google Place Pages with the place where local business information is claimed, entered and enhanced:

Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages – the way that businesses are being found today – with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.

Decreased media usage during the recession, plus lower spending, put a hurting on advertising prices in 2009, according to the Yankee Group (via). Their study shows that Americans spent only 11:50 with media each day last year. Yeah, that’s 11 hours and 50 minutes—or nearly half the day and the majority of our waking hours. That’s down from over 14 hours in 2008.

Television and video were the hit hard, losing an hour a piece. The Internet lost only 40 minutes, and remained in the top slot. But mobile was the big mover here—the only category to show an increase over 2008, with a 12% increase and within mobile, “Internet use grew 36 percent, to 11 minutes a day, and texting grew 55 percent, to 27 minutes a day.” (Percentage-wise, reading actually suffered the biggest loss, 59%.)

Facebook is the most popular social network in the world, but that’s not quite enough for them. Finally ready to venture outside their walled garden, Facebook may be unveiling a decentralized version of their site that allows Facebook users to interact on on other sites around the web. But does this mean Facebook’s ready to cede control of its users, or is it just extending its greedy grasp further?

Says the New York Times:

Details of Facebook’s plans — which involve a variation on its “Share” button, already prevalent on many sites — are expected to be introduced by Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, on Wednesday during its conference here for third-party developers. But even before Facebook makes its plans public, its aim to become a social networking force across the Web is facing competition.

Wow. A site / concept that is barely 1 ½ years old that hits the $1 billion valuation mark? I had to see if I stepped into some worm hole that took me back in time to the late 1990’s. Apparently I have not and neither has Groupon who, by landing $135 million in an additional funding through Digital Sky Technology and Battery Ventures, has attained a standing that very few sites in the world can claim: a $1 billion valuation.

As reported at All Things Digital and the press release of this news:

Chicago/Moscow, April. 19, 2010–Groupon, the leading social commerce site, today announced that DST, a leading global internet investment group, will lead an investment round of $135 million in the Company. A portion of the investment will be used to fuel Groupon’s global expansion, and the rest will be used to facilitate liquidity for employees and early investors.

Apparently Google has had enough of Al Gore.

That’s the only logical explanation for its apparent decision to reinvent the web starting with the removal of http:// from web addresses.

…Google recently made a change in the developer version that ruffled some feathers: the URL field will no longer show the “http://”. This made a lot of people very upset…For a while now, Mobile Safari has been doing something similar, although I do think in that case, it’s about saving space. On Mobile Safari, the scheme is hidden until you tap the URL field to edit. The developer version of Google Chrome takes this a step further, and omits the scheme completely