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Foursquare Retail Checkins Up During Holiday

posted on December 29, 2010

I will say that one of the hardest things to do when writing a post is to get all of the pertinent information in the headline. There are some days where I feel like I am feeding the machine with headlines like this since there are many people who don’t read these posts but just shuttle them on with retweets (Can you believe that people would do that in this day and age of such reliable information? :-) ).

Well today’s data comes from AdAge and Foursquare by way of the SAI Chart of the Day. Here’s the information.

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Astroturfing: Maybe it’s Not as Bad as it Seems

posted on December 29, 2010

Astroturfing is defined as the act of creating a false sense of grassroots support. The two most common examples are politics and online reviews. For example, a Senator receives a flood of letters that appear to be a spontaneous response to a political event but the letters are actually from an organized group who will gain something by swaying the vote.

Online, it could be a series of very positive product reviews that seem to come from Average Janes when in reality they were posted by an employee of the company.

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Apple Gets Hit with Privacy Suit: A Poem

posted on December 28, 2010

Twas the week after Christmas and all through the land, millions of folks were making merry with iPads in their hands. In their pockets were iPhones, both fresh from the box. This Christmas was the best, they shouted, it really does rock!

But off in the distance they heard a small sound, the noise of a lawsuit slapping Apple around! They’re stealing our info, the lawsuit did shout. Leaving folks all to wonder what the fuss was about.

It’s the apps, said the lawsuit, they’re selling us out, they’re smashing our privacy of that there’s no doubt. Our names and locations, age, gender and more, if the app companies want it, we should show them the door! Apple can’t be allowed to sell our info this way, without our consent and without giving us pay. It’s our information and we want it kept quiet, so the court needs to stop them so no one can buy it!

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The Online – Offline Marketing Chasm

posted on December 28, 2010

I just saw a chart from MarketingSherpa that shows the most important objectives of an e-mail campaign. The findings make sense to a point. Here is the chart showing what is deemed most important in descending order.

I was a little surprised at the difference between the most important e-mail objective (to generate revenue) and the idea of e-mail supporting offline marketing programs. It’s data like this that should create some serious head-scratching amongst marketing executives.

Why? It’s because it shows that the online and offline marketing world are siloed more often than not and that is just bad policy. 25% of the respondents didn’t even think that supporting offline efforts through e-mail was important at all. Huh? Really?! Over the years the Internet marketing community has worked so hard to establish itself that it may be moving toward alienating itself to some degree.

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What Internet Marketers Should Concentrate On For 2011

posted on December 28, 2010

This is not your typical Top Ten list of “Things to Look for in the Next Year or So!”. There are plenty of those out there and they all pretty much say the same thing. So rather than add to the noise I am going to come at 2011 from a different angle. To be honest, none of these are going to bowl you over. Why? Because most things worth paying attention to really aren’t that sexy. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Here is my “Top Ten Things Internet Marketers Should Concentrate on in 2011”.

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Are You Still Using That Old Phone? Mobile Marketing Goes for the Throat

posted on December 27, 2010

“Are you really still rockin’ a flip phone?”

That’s an ad you might see if you try surfing the web with your Motorola Razr phone only it’s being sent to you by Nokia. It’s called “intercept campaigning” and according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, it’s becoming very popular among cell phone companies as they all vie for a piece of a pretty small pie.

Says, Phuc Truong, managing director of Mobext:

“The [wireless] market is saturated, and pretty cutthroat. There’s not that much room to play. You can go after a new segment that doesn’t have mobile phones, or you could refine and search for users that just are getting out of their two-year plans.”

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FCC to NBC: No More Exclusive Video Deals

posted on December 27, 2010

Comcast cleared one more hurdle last week in it’s bid to acquire control of NBC Universal. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski gave the deal his blessing as long as they agreed to certain conditions. Conditions that certainly took the merry out of Hulu’s Christmas.

Says the Wall Street Journal:

According to people close to the FCC negotiations, those conditions would require that Comcast make NBC Universal and its other Comcast-owned video content available to pay-TV competitors at reasonable, nondiscriminatory terms. He also wants to impose conditions that would require Comcast to offer NBC Universal programming to other online video providers.

Right now, Hulu is the preferred carrier of all NBC programming online. They do syndicate out the video feeds to other third party sites, but they still get a piece of the pie and control of what and where it goes.