Marketing Pilgrim

Apple says that more than one million users joined their new music-focused social network Ping in the 48 hours following its launch. I find that hard to believe. I do believe that people will flock like seagulls on a chip bag to a hot new social media site even though they can’t keep up with the ones they’re already on. I do believe that people will jump at the idea of a music-based network (take that Myspace!) especially one brought to you buy the maker of the iPod.

What I have trouble with is the fact that when I sign on to Ping, I can’t find more than twenty people using the site. Those that I did find were all in the music biz. What gives?

I have some great news! On Wednesday, my sister gave birth to my third niece! Now with three nieces and one nephew I have the job of spoiling them cut out for me! But don’t worry I am up to the challenge.

While visiting my new niece in the hospital on Wednesday, I couldn’t help but think of the amazing amount of potential that lay before her. She has a whole world of experiences to explore for the first time. Her first song to sing. Her first taste of ice cream. Her first book. Her first blog post and even her first tweet. Because of her inexperience she will approach each one of these activities with an open mind and develop a truly unique perspective as a result. Because of this, she has an inherent advantage that others older than her don’t. She has a Beginner’s Mind.

In a recent survey about holiday shopping, 64% of the people said they’ll be spending less on everyone this holiday season, so that means marketers will have to work a little harder to make sure it’s their company that gets the cash and not their competitor. The trick is paying attention to how and why people are spending and customizing your marketing efforts to match.

eMarketer has a nifty new report called, “Online Holiday Shopping Preview: What Retailers Need to Know,” that can help, but here are a few of the basics. 42.7% of the people surveyed said they would only buy gifts that were on sale and 36% said they’d be doing more comparison shopping before forking over the cash.

As I noted in my other post today, Twitter is reporting some serious numbers. 145 million registered users and 300,000 registered apps for those users just to name a few. In the end though it’s just noise unless people are actually using the service.

According to research from Royal Pingdom the increase in number of accounts is translating to usage rates climbing as well.

About the numbers the Pingdom people state

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

And if you look at the whole year so far, the increase is even more impressive. Activity on Twitter has already more than doubled this year (August had 115% more tweets than January).

I used to be a keyword research freak.

Seriously! If you found me at one of the big conferences in the early 2000s you would have likely heard me discussing the importance of keyword research. “Keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO,” I would say. “Target the wrong keywords and it won’t matter if you are #1 on Google or not.”

Yeah, I took it seriously.

I still do, and that’s why I’m sharing this experience from the WebmasterWorld forums. WMW member vivalasvegas follows-up on a report he submitted previously about the sudden loss of almost 5,000 visitors a day for one keyword combination.

Twitter has made some strides to get the mobile experience working better as of late. They have been very successful in this area which is critical since the geo-location movement promises to make mobile even more important in the not so distant future.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, gave some telling stats on the Twitter blog

Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April

16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients)

46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience

78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com — though that number includes people who use more than one app

m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%