Marketing Pilgrim

With half the year behind us, ZenithOptimedia has revised their 2010 global ad forecasts from a 1.5% decrease to a 1.3% increase in North America. The change is due to a surprising increase in consumer spending and confidence despite rampant unemployment and most of the change is coming from the online sector.

Newspapers and magazine are both expected to continue their downward spiral, while radio, outdoor and cinema remain fairly flat. Television is on the rise again after a downturn in 2009 but it’s Internet that’s galloping along at a brisk pace.

Looking at internet advertising by type, paid search leads the way and by 2012, the figure is expected to nearly double what was being spent in 2008. Display advertising dropped slightly last year, but is expected to rise again in the near future.

Remember when Blockbuster was king of the video rental biz? It was a brilliant concept developing at a time when studios were charging $80 for a new movie on VHS. But as DVD took over from VHS and the price point on new movies began to drop, Blockbuster found itself slipping from the top spot and now has become the Betamax of home video rentals – once loved, but now forgotten.

These days it’s Netflix who is wearing the crown with their original concept of offering all the DVDs you want for a flat rate per month (no late fees), delivered right to your mailbox. With 100,000 titles to choose from, including old movies, TV shows and indies, Netflix’s only downside is the wait and that’s where Redbox comes in.

Despite the fact that the average customer wants to interact via social media, 30 percent of companies don’t have a program in place to handle the demand. That’s according to a study by Yankee Group and it’s not really surprising. Many companies still see social media as a time-waster that keeps their employees from getting their work done. Some companies have even gone so far as to block sites such as Twitter and Facebook, but in cutting off their employees, they could be cutting off their virtual noses to spite their user profiles.

The Yankee Group study found that nearly 60% of customers feel company outreach via social media would improve their loyalty to a company.

70% said they want and trust company information that comes to them through social networks and most respondents said companies should monitor social media for customer feedback.

There are many ways to measure the ROI of social media marketing. One that Forrester recommends in its new report The ROI of Social Media Marketing is the “risk management perspective.”

Essentially, how does a social media marketing initiative help reduce the financial impact of a reputation management crisis?

The costs of a social PR crisis can be substantial. To generate a value for the risk management perspective, consider how your social media preparedness and assets can reduce these costs across several different social media crisis scenarios. For instance, a midsized company might consider the social implications of a batch of defective products caused by unforeseen manufacturing issues in an overseas plant — and find that involvement in social media helps insure them against an average annual possible risk of $25,000.

When Twitter finally got to the point where it realized that there needed to be a next step (whether they felt ready or not they were told they were ready by everyone and their brother) they turned to deals with the search engines. It’s a rite of passage for businesses t reach the level where they can even be thought of as a viable source of information that the engines would actually pay to have.

It appears as if foursquare is about there already. The Telegraph has the scoop

Speaking exclusively to The Telegraph, Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder, said that his company was in talks with “everyone” in the search space – including all three major players: Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft about a data partnership.

Google has continued its recent acquisition spree by picking up Metaweb which will be used to enhance its search results. What’s that you say? Google is buying another company to help it do search better? Now that’s a company that is secure in its ‘search-hood”.

The LA Times Technology blog tells more

Metaweb provides an online database of “over 12 million things” that range from information on college tuition to data on gadgets. The service is designed for website owners who want to extend the functionality of their sites by making the company’s database content available to users.