Marketing Pilgrim

It seems like you can’t visit a website or blog these days without seeing a line of social media share buttons — Twitter, Facebook, Google+. But according to numbers from Bright Edge, only 53.6% of websites use social share buttons. That’s up slightly up from last month, but still leaves a lot of the landscape untouched by social share.

While a lack of sharing buttons may make for a cleaner web page, it’s not doing the marketer any favors. The Bright Edge report shows that sites with a Twitter share button had seven times more link mentions than sites without.

Of the sites that have implemented share buttons, Facebook is still the most popular widget with 50.3% adoption rate. Twitter follows closely with 42.5%. Google+ sits at only 8% but like the other two sites, the rate is on the rise. Only LinkedIn remains flat at 4%.

Facebook wants to make you happy. That’s why they have a little X next to the sidebar ads that allows you to get rid of any pitch that doesn’t please you. Now, they’re taking it a step further by allowing users to block specific advertisers.

According to Inside Facebook, the “hide all from [advertiser]” option is currently being beta tested as part of the drop down you see pictured here.

For Facebook, this is an easy way to get the users to their job for them. If a large number of people block ads saying they’re misleading, then Facebook’s backend should see the problem and bring it to a human’s attention.

A study released by IBM Coremetrics entitled “4th Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report” highlights some interesting shifts in consumer behavior in the online space. To sum it up quickly, people are spending more than ever online. Average order value was up an average of 10% across several points during the holiday season including Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Reasons for this upward tick is that people have become more trusting of online retailers, they hate shopping in crowds (my personal favorite), they are saving the expense of driving etc that goes with shopping in a brick and mortar etc. There are any number of highly personal reasons for this to happen.

Twitter and advertising have been strange bedfellows indeed. Originally, the service was for the geek crowd and the mere thought of commercialism was anathema amongst these folks.

As the service moved more into the mainstream people have wondered how the service will make money (be careful how you define mainstream because many believe it hasn’t gotten there even today, this writer included). As a result, there has been much consternation and debate about Twitter’s future with revenue generation.

Now we have entered the era of the Promoted Tweet. Will it work? Will people be turned off? A survey by Lab42 that was reported by eMarketer provides some insight that is sure to please Jack and company.

Mother Nature is a powerful lady. Not only can she tear down buildings in a blink of an eye, she can also throw a nation’s economy into a whirl that rivals her worst tornado.

This time around, we lucked out.

Hurricane Irene was kinder than expected which is to take nothing away from the millions of people who are still dealing with the aftermath. With more important things than back-to-school shopping on their minds, consumers stopped spending last weekend and it hurt quite a few stores. There’s no telling what the impact was on small businesses up and down the coast, but large chains including Macy’s and JC Penny both missed their monthly sales goals and they blame it on the storm.

Google!

Our favorite rankers, the Nielsen Company, has worked out a complex new scheme that measures total hits to websites through a variety of sources. Their “hybrid data” approach combines information from their online panel with data culled from traffic tools in order to reach a more exact number.

Nielsen says their data includes usage from both home and work computers, but also takes into account visits through smartphones, tablets and possibly psychic connections where no device was needed in order to make contact.

Overall, 213 million people were online in July, they each spent an average of 27 hours and 14 minutes online, viewing 2,572 webpages per person.

How many of those people did you reach with your marketing efforts?