Marketing Pilgrim

I wonder how many times this has really happneed? (HT to @leeodden and @ScottMonty)

Dilbert always makes me laugh or at least think “Yea, I ‘ve seen that happen.” Why shouldn’t the new “cool kids” from social media feel the sting as well?

You may think that email, Twitter and Facebook are all slight variations on the same tune, but the ExactTarget Research Series, Subscribers, Fans and Followers has shown that each venue has its own X-Factor which makes it special. The trick, which is summarized in their newly published final report, is figuring out how to make them all work as a team.

The study begins by breaking down the numbers and there was a surprise here. 93% of online consumers say they receive at least one permission-based email a day. These are the subscribers. 38% said they are a Facebook fan of at least one brand. These are the fans. The surprise is in the followers, those U.S. online consumers who say they follow at least one brand on Twitter. That number is 5%. That’s it.

A few weeks ago I bought my niece a jar of Jelly Belly jelly beans. If you haven’t tried these amazing beans yet, you are missing out! They have over 50 flavors that are truly remarkable. The popcorn flavor is my favorite! Herman Rowland, one of Jelly Belly’s chief product engineers tells us that the flavor “…has to be something that you can visualize the taste in your mind.”

This is important to him, because fundamentally, Jelly Belly’s main product is the experience not the candy itself. The artificial colors, corn syrup, and gelatin act only as a delivery agent for the real product, the experience. It’s the experience they create and sell, that sets them apart from all of their competitors. With out this unique experience they would be just like all the other jelly bean makers.

Remember when your mom used to say, “if all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?” Statically, yeah, you probably would because it’s been proven that our behavior is influenced by the behavior and approval of our peers.

This is the idea behind Facebook’s ‘social endorsement’ ad program where you see who on your friend’s list “liked” an ad. Nielsen did a study and found that an ad with social context upped ad recall by 10% and also pumped up the intent to buy and awareness.

Facebook is now ready to test the numbers themselves as they’ve added social endorsement metrics to your Ads Manager.

When you visit your Ads Manager on Facebook, you’ll now find a column labeled “Social %.”  This tells you what percentage of your ads with social endorsements received clicks.

Google’s quest to diversify from its search marketing cash cow (and inordinate slice of its total revenue at over 95%) is getting more and more obvious with each passing day.

One can predict just how serious Google is about something if it has produced a video around it. If that video seems more like an ad then you can bet that Google thinks this is the real deal. So it looks like display advertising is the next big thing for the Google advertising machine to ratchet up and show the rest of the world that despite its product diversity Google is not a one trick revenue pony.

Here’s the video that is aimed at the agency world to tell them display with Google is the wave of the future (oops, poor choice of words considering the recent euthanizing of Google’s Wave……my bad).

According to the Silicon Alley Insider and comScore, Facebook has taken over as the place where people spend more time online than even Google sites. This is a first apparently for Facebook who now seems to make a habit of reaching new milestones on a regular basis. Here’s the picture.

My question is what Google sites are we talking about? If it is all Google’s sites in aggregate that would then include YouTube and Gmail which then makes this chart really quite fascinating.As for Yahoo, well, the good news keeps rolling in huh as it appears that boatloads of minutes online are shifting away from them even more.

How much time do you spend on Facebook these days? Is it more important to your life (business and personal) than the use of Google sites, which are not really social (at least not today)?