Marketing Pilgrim

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You know what I love about performance marketing? The way it builds on itself. It’s a pretty stable beast if managed correctly. You set things in motion, you give them some time and some love and they grow. They grow into these well optimized, highly efficient, and (hopefully) lucrative marketing channels that earn you all sorts of good things like more money, more customers, better brand sentiment, so on and so forth.

Performance marketing is a predictable science most of the time. Then enter “web-based promotions.” Talk about throwing a wrench in things. They are anything but predictable. More commonly, they involve things like difficult tracking challenges, missed launch dates, social media chaos, and let’s not forget the scariest possibility – utter failure.

LinkedIn got more than a rise in stock prices when they announced their IPO in May. They also gained 6.7% more users over the prior month. This is especially significant since they showed a 2.5% decline in April.

According to Bloomberg, LinkedIn is now poised to take over the number two spot from MySpace, who had 34.9 million unique users in May compared to LinkedIn’s 33.4. MySpace’s number sounds nice until you see that it’s a 48% decline from the same period in the prior year. Facebook is still number one, but new reports claim that they’re losing ground as well.

Could LinkedIn not only take over the number two spot but move to number one as well? Yes, and no.

Those who predicted that the internet would kill TV were probably the same people that said TV would put movie theaters out of business. A look at entertainment and media ad spending so far this year proves otherwise.

Earlier this month, all of the big five TV networks showed gains in ad sales during the Upfronts in New York. CBS pulled in a projected $2.5 billion to $2.55 billion in TV ad sales compared to the $2.4 billion they made last year. NBC took in $1.7 billion compared to $1.6 billion last year.

Today, the New York Times is reporting on new stats from PricewaterhouseCoopers which shows that entertainment and media ad spending in 2010 grew by 5.4% compared with 2009.

While the questions still remain about how many people are really using Twitter versus the number that have “accounts” there are, studies are being conducted to see what users expect from brands on the service.

In short, about 60% of the people who have over 100 followers expect some kind of interaction from brands when they mention them in the microblogging service. Emarketer shares this data

As per usual, consumers expect things to happen exactly how they think it should which often spells difficulty for the service whose processes may not give everyone the attention they deem worthy.

Google continues to try to make Google Places the best place on the web to get business information. Hotpot is now integrated and in a blog post from the Places blog, Google tells of its efforts to make these listings even more descriptive by using common phrases from across the web to tell about each place.

Starting today, Google Maps search results in the U.S. and Great Britain will include some of the phrases, which are most frequently used to describe those places. These phrases come from sources all across the web, such as reviews, web pages and other online references, and they can help people quickly identify the characteristics that make a particular place unique. It’s like an opportunity to ask the business owner or its patrons “What’s good here?” or “What do most people get here?”

Ten days ago, Jared Padalecki, one of the stars of the CW series Supernatural got a Twitter account. He started it after years of saying he never would and couldn’t even get his own name because of there are so many imposters on Twitter. He settled on @jarpad, announced it at a fan convention, then took a photo of his co-star at the convention as proof that it was really him.

As of this morning, Jarpad has 94,132 followers and they aren’t just sitting idle. Many of them complied with Jared’s wishes to vote for a band he produces in a House of Blues contest, shooting them up to number one.

Then there’s Jared’s co-star Misha Collins. He has 219,000 followers and parlayed his Twitter fame into a charity that raised around $100,000 last year for an orphanage in Haiti.