In class work

GOAL(S): Explain why this site was created. What is/are the goal(s)? Look for such goals as providing customer support, selling, providing and/or collecting information, advertising, building a community, entertainment, brand building, awareness, driving buyers offline, and the like.

GOAL PAGE: What is the site’s goal page? Describe it and explain why it is/is not effective.

EFFECTIVENESS: How effectively does the site accomplish the goal(s)? Provide specific examples to support your analysis.

INCENTIVES: What incentives are there for visitors to return to this site? Are the incentives effective? What makes them effective

PRIVACY: Is there a privacy statement on the site? Is it effective? What makes it effective?

SECURITY: Is there a security statement? Is one needed?

TARGET MARKETS: Who are the target markets for the site? Are they consumers, businesses, both, or others? Identify as many characteristics as possible.

VALUE: How does the site deliver value for the target markets? Does the site effectively communicate with them?

CONTROLS: What methods are used to measure site usage and obtain feedback? Are they effective?

OFFER: What is the offer? What products (goods, services, etc.) are offered (if any)?

Online Research Drives Offline Sales

Online product research is driving more in-store sales than online sales, says eMarketer's Jennifer Grau.

Last year, eMarketer estimated that store sales influenced by online research totaled $471 billion. Comparatively, retail e-commerce sales were only $136 billion.

Looked at another way, for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.

Read the eMarketer article here.

Google Health Records Set Off Privacy Alarms

Google today unveiled a pilot program that enables people to store and share information about their medical conditions online. Google today unveiled a pilot program that enables people to store and share information about their medical conditions online. Read this story here.

Integrating images in search algorithms

This blog presents a test of image inclusion in searches from the top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Micosoft and AskJeeves). 10 different search terms were tried out. One of the search terms ended with the word “pics”, four ended with “pictures” and five ended with the word “images”. Conclusions favor Microsoft and put Google at disadvantage. Draw your own conclusions from the results...

A YouTube for How To

A New York City startup called Howcast is launching today that wants to be the YouTube of instructional videos. In fact, the three founders—Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman—are ex-Google employees who worked on Google Video and YouTube before they left eight months ago. They actually are going for a little more polish than YouTube, trying to bring some production values to the world of Web video.

Howcast is also announcing an $8 million series A financing, led by Tudor Investment Corp. In addition to their own site, they already have a Youtube channel (where they split advertising revenues with their former employer). The Howcast team also has signed distribution deals with Myspace, Verizon for its Vcast phones and FiOS TV, Joost, and ROO. JetBlue is the launch advertiser. Read the entire story here.

Super Bowl Ads Online - 1984 till today

If you wanted to watch again your favorite Super Bowl commercials - now you have the chance! Check out this statistic from The New York Times of all Super Bowl commercials from 1984 to 2008. Click on the stat icons to watch the commercials. Enjoy!

Microsoft's Bid for Yahoo! is about the Advertising

From the press release: "The online advertising market is growing at a very fast pace, from over $40 billion in 2007 to nearly $80 billion by 2010. The resulting benefits of scale along with the associated capital costs for advertising platform providers make this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners."

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO said in a statement: "We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market."

Read Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo! board members here.

World's Web Users Are Shopping Online - eMarketer

World's Web Users Are Shopping Online - eMarketer

eMarketer reports on a global study done by The Nielsen Company.
Click on the image to view what are the items purchased online globally.
Books are at the top of the list, followed by clothing. Sports memorabilia rank last on the itemized list.

Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo!

If the deal goes through, Microsoft/Yahoo would dominate online display and rival Google in search, writes MediaPost's Joe Mandese. The deal would mark the largest yet in the ongoing consolidation among the Internet's big bodied players, and would once again reset the playing field for online advertising industry. Read Joe's article here.

SEM Tops Online Advertising Spending

According to an eMarketer report, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is at the top of online advertising spending.

The Search Engine Marketing report tracks the trends that are driving the massive but still-growing search advertising market.

eMarketer estimates that Google raked in 75% of US paid search advertising in 2007, up from 60% in 2006. Number two, Yahoo!, collected a mere 9% share, while everyone else split 16% of the pie.

With over $8.6 billion going to search engine advertising in 2007, that 16% stake equals nearly $1.4 billion. And with search spending nearly doubling to almost $16.6 billion in 2011, even a small slice represents significant revenue.

MK669 Internet Marketing Class New Location

Starting tonight, Jan 31st, we will be meeting up in Roncalli Hall conference room 257. See you there at 6:30pm.

Starbucks to shut down stores in the US

I am posting this even though it only has to do with marketing, not Internet marketing. Mark e-mailed me before the start of the semester about Starbucks being in trouble for thinning on customer service so that budgets are spent on opening more stores. It definitely hurt them, here is the article in today's New York Times.

On measuring online engagement

On Thursday, we are going to talk about Internet research. The key term coined by the advertising/marketing industry to describe the purpose of marketing efforts is consumer engagement. To define engagement, I enlisted Gary Stein from ClickZ, an interactive marketing news resource. Gary writes that the ad industry generated the term engagement as an attempt to understand the degree to which a particular brand's story is built in a consumer's mind. Ultimately, engagement matches up with what marketers know about consumers and how they make decisions. Engagement is a natural evolution away from such measures as "awareness" and "purchase intent," writes Gary.
However, when it comes to evaluating online engagement, there is no consensus on what engagement really signifies, nor how it should be measured. Read Kevin Mannion's account of current online engagement methodologies here. Kevin is a founder of Sky Road Consulting.
For more thoughts on why measuring engagement is difficult, read Gary's article Consumer Engagement: Breaking the Perfect Measurement Myth.

Einstein knew more about marketing than you think...

The most memorable column I read in MediaPost last week belongs to Max Kalehoff, VP of Marketing at Clickable. I have been reading Max's columns and comments since 2006 and he always surprises me with his original thoughts on marketing issues. Here are ten quotes from Einstein together with Max's comments that definitely apply to the world of marketing today. You may read the entire article on Max's blog.

1. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” So why not cultivate imagination? Why not seek it out when screening new hires, or emphasize it in professional development, or cherish it when problem-solving?

2. “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.” What really are you trying to achieve? How well is your mission defined? Perfection of everything else is meaningless if you and your organization don’t know where you’re headed. This is where leadership begins.

3. “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” This is an ideology of humbleness, selflessness and authenticity. Embodying this ideology creates longer-term, competitive advantage. Value to customer is what really matters, not whether you’re successful. You’ll end up successful if you create value.

4. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” In an increasingly quant-driven marketplace, it’s easy to obsess on what you can count and disregard the rest. This paradox contributes to the confusion of aims mentioned above. To be successful, it’s critical to find alternative means of codifying and leveraging the important things you can’t count.

5. “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.” Perhaps violence is less relevant in most businesses, but size and complexity are major problems. For reasons I can’t explain, marketers too often get obsessed with size and complexity - as if they’re desirable. The fact is they’re the opposite, and they’re offensive jabs at our most precious assets: time and attention. Marketers may not see this, but customers do. Customers delight in simplicity and efficient use of space and time.

6. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” This is true for internal employee communications, as well as customer communications. Master your subject matter so you can confidently pick the language, concepts and style that communicate with the greatest ease and efficiency.

7. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” Mistakes and losses should actually be rewarded. Fear and low tolerance for mistakes breads stagnant cultures and boring products.

8. “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” When you enable passion, you drive focus, cultivate mastery, leverage spontaneity, foster creativity, build intuition and live toward mission. The dots connect, clarity emerges.

9. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” Truth is paramount, but carelessness with what is small is a window into how one may handle anything large. The small stuff matters.

10. “Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.” Same for marketing and business in general. Need I say more?

Google slides 160 points

I mentioned in class that the author of one of our textbooks, John Battelle, keeps a blog. Here is a posting from his blog mentioning Google's slide.

Paper topics due Thursday, Jan 31st

This is a reminder that you should pick one aspect of internet marketing and study it in depth and write a 10-page paper about it. Topics are due this coming Thursday, Jan 31st. A list of possible topics is at the end of the class syllabus.
Also, please sign up your blogs with www.sitemeter.com by Thursday.

Last blog site - from Brian and Mark

I have posted the existing three class blogs in my Crixenauf post on Friday. Last one in just now: http://grapebeginnings.blogspot.com . Have fun commenting!

Measuring Social Networking Online

Study says: Social Networking Results are Difficult To Track. Social Networking may be among the hottest online categories, but it's also the most difficult to track user behavior on, according to a survey of digital marketing managers. Read the entire article here.

A Job Search Engine

Just read this - a search engine for jobs only! Read about JobFox here.

CRIXENAUF

It's Friday!!! My baby, whom I'm watching here, seems to know I'll have more time for her during the next couple of days. Last night on my drive home from Fairfield (night, snow, fog, about 30 miles per hour) I was pondering whether our CRIXENAUF contest should be run on separate blogs than your chosen-topic ones. What do you think? This of course if I decide it before Brian and Mark make up their minds to call their new wine-related blog CRIXENAUF. It would make for a good wine brand, sounds like some German castle where good old wine is made.
Anyway, before Brian and Mark e-mail me their new blog site, here are the existing three:
http://luxtheplacetobe.blogspot.com
http://bradsbigidea.blogspot.com
http://seekingspears.blogspot.com
Have fun commenting!

Who Doesn't Use the Internet

Is everyone online? Should everyone be online? Yesterday, we asked whether marketers should want everyone to be surfing the Net. This implies that for now, not everyone is. Current research results show that about a quarter of the US population is not on the Internet. To read the entire report, access this article from e Marketer.
Feel free to comment on whether you think the report is accurate or different from what you thought...

Search Marketing Strategies For The Next Decade

Since we started talking about search yesterday (and you still have quite a few chapters to read about it), here is an article on search-focused strategies from the lead on search marketing discipline of Avenua A /Razorfish advertising agency. As you see, advertising agencies now have an entire department dedicated to search strategies...

The article centers around aligning site content with searcher intent. Here it is: Search Marketing Strategies for the Next Decade.

On digital rights for online music...

Next week, we will discuss a Harvard case on the online music industry. Here is the latest on what is happening with the digital rights for music: http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?id=1005834&src=print_article_graybar_article&xsrc=print1_articlex

Erika, you should definitely check this and maybe use it in the class discussion.

Welcome!

MK669 Students, WELCOME!
This blog is the home of MK669 Internet Marketing. Please get used to checking it frequently, at least once a week before each class. Additional articles for class discussion and any important announcements will be made here.

The thought-provoking article of the day: "Google Plans Service to Store Users' Data Online"
Read it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119612660573504716.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news

Dr. Micu