Marketing Pilgrim

It’s time for the Millennial Media MobileMix for May. Say that three times fast.

This month, they added connected devices to the mix and found out that 70% of all impressions are coming from portable video gaming devices and MP3 players. Tablets got 29% of the pie, items such as ebook readers and connected TVs ate up the rest.

Music also helped push “Entertainment & Music” into the number one spot on the chart for Top 10 Mobile Application Categories. That category showed growth of 14%. Games came in second, followed by Mocial, Communications and our old friend Weather. Travel moved up 33% thanks to folks planning their summer vacations.

Apple is responsible for 45% of the applications in the atmosphere, but Android is running a close second with 43%.

Mountain Dew is getting personal with a new series of ads promoting three discontinued flavors that are back for a limited time. It’s called the “Back by Popular Dewmand” campaign and it’s designed to reward the fans that worked hard to get the product back on the shelf.

It all began at Mountain Dew’s Facebook page where fans were asked to vote on their favorite flavors then back it up with videos and photos. Each flavor had a winner and the winner was treated to a flavor party with their friends. But it doesn’t stop there. Now Mountain Dew is running banner and radio ads that feature the name and likeness of those rabid Dew fans.

Do you remember the last few days of the school year when you were a kid? There wasn’t much in terms of classes and lectures. Oftentimes you watched more videos than normal, right? The hope was that you would watch a video and maybe learn something.

Well, consider today like one of those days. Earlier today we showed you the videos on the search updates Google announced yesterday. Well, there were more updates but this time it had to do with mobile search. So sit back and relax and watch a couple of videos from the Google Mobile blog that do a fine job explaining what these updates do to improve the mobile search experience.

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Mobile social networking, or mocial, is when you use your phone to access Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or any other social networking site. People have been doing it for a couple of years, but now that smartphones and social media apps are so prevalent, it’s become one of the most popular categories in mobile usage.

The chart comes from a webinar delivered by comScore titled ‘The State of the U.S. Mobile Advertising Industry and What Lies Ahead” The bars show usage comparisons between March 2010 and March 2011. At a quick glance, you can see that every category showed growth, with social networking and map usage on mobile up nearly 50%. Weather and news of all kinds grew in the 30% – 40% range. Even IMing got a double digit boost.

Dell became infamous in reputation management circles several years ago with their Dell Hell customer service reputation being cemented. The company has worked hard to move away from the moniker but if recent data from online customer service rating company STELLAService is any indication it may be time to say “It’s baaaaaaack!”.

The company examined the Top 100 Internet Retailers from the Internet Retailer 500 list. They examined how long wait times were for service by the phone. They also looked at how long the response time was via e-mail for these companies.

The chart below shows the top performers with the average response time for e-mail requests in an hr:min:sec format. Office Depot takes the top spot for fastest responder.

TOP 10 PERFORMERS FOR E-MAIL RESPONSE – INTERNET RETAILER TOP 100

Google is busy keeping its flagship, cash cow, money printing search machine going full speed ahead.

Yesterday the company announced several search improvements. Here are three videos explaining each new service. It’s worth your time to take a look.

First, instant pages for search.

The Webmaster Central blog has more information about this service.

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