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Add Your Location to Your Gmail Signature

posted on February 11, 2009

The Gmail Team rolled out a really cool new feature to their Gmail services: you can now have your whereabouts added to your signature at the time your email was sent. I’m sure half of you are thinking “that’s awesome!” while the other half are saying, “who cares?” Google is able to do this through the use of IP detection.

As Gmail Software Engineer, and writer of the script, Marco Bonechi points out, this is the perfect solution for those of us who are frequent travelers. I think this is a great tool for salesman who are frequently returning emails from all over the world. It gives clients and customers an idea of how big your business is. If anything, I would think it is impressive to see a new location from fellow business associates.

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Mobile Ads Perform Best on the iPhone

posted on February 6, 2009

ReadWriteWeb reports that market research agency GfK released a report today that found iPhone users are more likely to recall and respond to ads than other mobile phone users. Surprising? Not really, but the report did find some very interesting statistics regarding mobile users.

  • One in ten mobile phone users in the U.S. used a location-based service such as a map, friend or restaurant finder in Q4 2008.
  • iPhone users are four times as likely to recall LBS (location-based service) ads as non-iPhone users.
  • While men and women are equally likely to recall mobile advertising, women are 85 percent more likely to respond to ads than men
  • Calling a toll free phone number published in the ads is the most common means of response; iPhone users called twice as much as non-iPhone users

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Online Video Viewing Surges While Google Continues to Capitalize

posted on February 5, 2009

comScore released its December online video viewing statistics yesterday. According to the report, December was record setting for the online video industry, reporting a growth of 13% over November in U.S. online video viewing. YouTube capitalized on that gain, accounting for 49% of the gain.

This increase further distances YouTube from its competitors. According to comScore this is the latest market-share breakdown of online video properties for U.S. online video viewing:

 

Other notable statistics from the report:

  • Google video sites also surpassed 100 million viewers in December. 
  • 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
  • The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
  • The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.

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Fake Social Media Profiles: The Biggest Online Threat of 2009?

posted on February 4, 2009

ReadWriteWeb reports that security firm Aladdin released their Annual Threat Report today, one of the biggest online identity theft threats of 2009 will be fake social media profiles. I don’t expect that to surprise any of Marketing Pilgrim’s readers, I do, however, expect it to come as a surprise to most of our clients and the less “Web savvy.”

Evil people are heading out to popular social media sites and setting up fake profiles and abusing those profiles. They are pretending to be someone in order to create valuable connections, and in some cases, to hurt online reputations. Director of Aladdin’s Attack Intelligence Research Center, Ian Amit, says this type of identity theft can be “devastating, both on the personal level by creating difficulties in employment, ruining social and professional connections, damaging reputations; as well as on a financial level, such as stealing customers, corporate data.”

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Women Over 55 Are Helping Facebook Takeoff

posted on February 3, 2009

Yep, you read that headline right. According to MediaPost, women over the age of 55 are the fastest-growing user group on Facebook over the last three months. This is significant considering how rapidly Facebook has been growing these last few months (600k users a day!).

The study also reports several other statistics that marketers should take note of:

  • Women make up 56.2% of Facebook users—outnumbering men in almost every age group
  • 25% of U.S. Facebook users are over the age of 35—considering that Facebook started as a college platform, this is very surprising.
  • 45% of U.S. users are over the age of 26—this isn’t as surprising as you take into account that this is now about the average age of early Facebook adopters.

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Web Viewers Will Tolerate Twice the Ads in Online Videos

posted on January 30, 2009

AdAge reports that ABC.com has started research to prove that online viewers will tolerate seeing multiple advertisements when watching popular shows like Grey’s Anatomy (funny, I can’t even tolerate that show.) So in other words, they can serve up ads similar to the way you would watch it on TV, and viewers will be fine with it as long as they get to watch their favorite shows.

I really don’t see how this could be true. Wouldn’t it just further encourage fans to use their DVR or to download the shows elsewhere (illegally or legally—i.e., iTunes). When you watch the shows on ABC’s website, you’re unable to fast forward through the ads. There is so much technology at our fingertips, that it gives viewers so many alternatives then sitting through a forced-commercial version of the show.

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Click Fraud Reaches Record High

posted on January 28, 2009

Click Forensics has released a study showing that click fraud has hit 17.1%, an all-time high. For those of you who are unfamiliar, click fraud represents the act of clicking on a web advertisement to inflate click-through rates.

TechCrunch points out that over 30% of click fraud is via automated bots—another all-time high. This is a 14% increase over last quarter. I’m surprised the search engines aren’t doing a better job at keeping the bots down. This clearly continues to be a problem and needs to be addressed. I think the search engines need to release a state of the industry report on how they plan to cut these rates now ASAP.

Outside of the U.S., Canada is the largest driver of click fraud (7.1%), followed by Germany (3%) and China (2.3%).