Marketing Pilgrim

Facebook has obviously been watching and taking notes regarding what has taken place with Google+ and brand pages (no matter how inane the whole thing was / is). As a result, it looks like someone at the social network cried down from the mountain to “Tell the Facebook for business story, now!”

The result? The Facebook for Business page which was introduced yesterday. Don’t get all panicky. There’s literally nothing new here. It just appears that in a fit of “Uh, shouldn’t all this information be in one easy place for people to get at?” Facebook has just aggregated the information already in existence into one place so it can be better understood. The video that appears on the “site within a site” was originally posted over a year ago. Here’s the page

Editor’s Note: Occasionally we will give our readers a look at various events that one of our writers will be attending. We have no connection to this event other than this post to inform you about the opportunity that exists for futher online marketing education and networking.

Affiliate Summit East is just around the corner (August 21-23) in New York and there’s no time like the present to plan your conference strategy. Who better to give you tips on getting the most out of Affiliate Summit than co-founder and conference organizer, Shawn Collins?

Shawn agreed to answer a few of my questions about how to maximize your time at ASE so I could share them with you, our awesome Marketing Pilgrim readers. Enjoy

Freemium – it’s a hybrid of free and paid and it’s all the rage in mobile gaming. Try the game for free, play for free, but if you really like it, pay a few dollars for more levels, more detail or a virtual donkey. Who wouldn’t want a virtual donkey? Actually, a lot of people will pass on that offer but it doesn’t matter.

According to stats from Flurry, Freemium games generate more revenue than straight-on paid games and it does it in a surprising way. As you can see from the chart below, only 13% of consumers were responsible for more than 50% the revenue.

Put aside your Facebook page, your mobile apps and skywriting, it’s time to get back to basics. Casale recently released a report about the good old fashioned banner ad and though the results weren’t surprising, they do bear repeating. Repetition is good.

The study found a huge jump in response rate for ads shown five or more times.

The study also reinforces the concept of “above the fold” saying that those ads are seven times more effective than those that go below. People are lazy, they don’t scroll, but what about on a tablet where it’s as easy as swiping your hand? Will the “above the fold” rule still apply? Will it become even more important? Will we eliminate the “fold” altogether by designing pages that fit the screen size in the way an app does?

Marketers are faced daily with a deluge of statistics and ‘proofs’ that whatever it is they chose to hitch their wagon to yesterday has now been replaced by something bigger, better and faster. It makes one wonder why anyone would want to be in online marketing if it always feels like you are a half-step behind the cool kids.

One thing that has stayed pretty consistent over time however is the power of e-mail marketing even with the continued proliferation of the mobile online world. According to research from ExactTarget (Warning: Research as PR alert level 5) email marketing drives purchases in the mobile space. eMarketer shared the data

In the world of online reputation management there are a few times when the “Did they really do that?” quotient goes off the chart. Naturally, one of the most obvious times where this can happen involves a tragedy. This weekend’s passing of singer Amy Winehouse shows just how willing people and companies are to put taste to the side for the sake of sales and traffic.

The two culprits who were just fine initially with using the singer’s death to try to get something for themselves were Microsoft and the Huffington Post. First, the Microsoft version of how not to use the Internet in times of tragedy.

On Monday, after Winehouse’s death over the weekend, the Microsoft UK PR account posted the following tweet.