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Cup of Joe: Hulu Is Losing Out On Revenue, Are You?

posted on February 18, 2012

About 3 years ago I got really angry with something that Wolf Blitzer said on CNN, and I canceled my cable. At the time everyone thought I was crazy. well actually everyone still thinks I am crazy, but not as much as back then. Because now a days services like Hulu and Netflix are slowly carving away at cable television’s stronghold. Despite the fact that these companies are obviously following a much larger trend, it seems at times it has been an uphill battle.

So, doesn’t it seem that if you were one of the few startups pitted against the largest media industries in the world you would do everything you could to tie up revenue leaks? You would think so, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Hulu.

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Facebook Stores: A Failed Experiment or Worth Another Shot?

posted on February 17, 2012

Gamestop, Nordstrom, Old Navy, The Gap. All blockbuster retailers who know how to drive customers to spend big bucks and not one of them had success selling on Facebook.

The failure of F-commerce is an interesting conundrum. Facebook is the most visited site in the universe. People also spend money on Facebook to buy virtual items and upgrades for their games. Facebook is also growing faster than anyone else for display advertising, pulling in around $2 billion in revenue last year.

Taking all of those factors into consideration, Facebook stores should be pulling them in like Best Buy on Black Friday. So why don’t Facebook stores work?

Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research told Bloomberg,

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7 Out of 10 Children Use the Family Tablet

posted on February 17, 2012

There’s a new TV commercial with a mom and dad having a spell-talk discussion about whether it’s okay for their child to use their Pantech Element tablet. Dad’s concerned, but mom assures him that it’s okay, because it’s w-a-t-e-rproof.

Then there’s the new Kindle commercial with the sexy woman at the beach. She’s reading on a Kindle and she gets approached by a man who tries to prove his prowess by telling her about his expensive tablet. She instantly cuts him in half stating that her Kindle makes reading easier in the sunlight, and for less than he paid, she also bought a Kindle Fire so her KIDS can watch movies at the beach. Take that, fella.

As these commercials aptly illustrate, tablets aren’t just for grownups anymore.

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Registration for Twitter Self Serve Ad Platform Opens for 10,000 Small Businesses

posted on February 17, 2012

Twitter has been working up to its more broadly offered self serve ad platform for a while now. To this point, there are about 100 advertisers that have been allowed to use the system but Twitter is about to expand that capability significantly as it looks to make 2012 a big year. This strategy is part of a larger plan for the social media company to reach the election year groups and international advertisers as well. It’s starting to look like Twitter plans to make some money.

AdAge reports

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Facebook Timelines for Brands? Time to Start Thinking Inside the Box

posted on February 16, 2012

On February 29, Facebook will be conducting their first event made specifically for marketers. At that time, AdAge believes they’ll make a big announcement – Timelines for brand pages.

Don’t panic. It might not be as bad as it sounds.

Last year, David Fischer, Facebook VP of Marketing and Business Partnerships, told AdAge that Timelines for brands wouldn’t be a carbon copy of Timelines for people. The word he used was “consistent”, meaning it would have the same general layout, graphics heavy with an emphasis on activity boxes.

For individuals, these activity  boxes highlight app use such as music on Spotify, additions to Pinterest, movies watched. . . oh, and status updates, too!

For brands, those boxes will likely hold information from the tabs on their brand page. This is a good thing.

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Marketing Usability: Effectively Turning Communication Into Action

posted on February 16, 2012

This post comes from our Social Media Channel sponsor Full Sail University.

From a technical standpoint, your website might look pretty good. You’ve validated your HTML. Every button and link goes where it’s supposed to go. And your shopping cart actually works.

Adhering to usability best practices on your website is key, but don’t stop measuring effectiveness at your forms or navigation. Some of the same best practices we employ to ensure the effectiveness of our site can also come in handy for marketing techniques.

Writing web copy, positioning calls to action, and designing ad campaigns demand the same attention to detail as the rest of your site. In fact, the usability of your marketing-focused sections must be just as effective as the most critical functions for your users. In other words, convincing people your site is the best is just as important as making sure the site really IS the best.

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Does Social Media Help You Spend More Than You Normally Would?

posted on February 16, 2012

You probably realize by now I am a research skeptic in most instances. I am what many call a “high skeptic”. All that means is that I come at these things form the angle that researchers will have to prove to me that they are genuine rather than the opposite approach which would be to just accept research as real just because it is research.

So when I saw the chart below from research conducted by ClearSaleing and reported by eMarketer I had a few thoughts.

The premise is that in a multi-channel approach the impact of social media is that people spend more, on average, when social media is part of that process.