May 16, 2008

A view from the office:

The Luxury Institute reports that married, wealthy women make nearly 2/3s of a families purchase decisions; often with their own money. A surprise - Home Depot was one of the brands singled out as doing a good job of marketing to this segment. Oh by the way, 60% of this group uses social networks, averaging membership in 2.8 networks and 110 connections. (Marketing Charts, MarketingVOX)
Why do people leave your site? The folks at iPerceptions and Avinash Kaushik (of Web Analytics an Hour a Day fame) have brought a free survey tool to us all. 4Q is a permission based on-exit survey tool focused on satisfaction. "It is better to ask the customer what you should do rather than implement a tool and try to figure it out based on clicks." Add it to your site today.
"When listening to the radio while browsing the Internet, more than half of the users search for items they hear about on the air," Christian Lee from Google Analytics. This is another reason why Google will integrate channels to be inline with user experiences.
David Kenny of Digitas makes a strong case for integrating media and creative teams. My take away -- each media has different strengths and roles and creative needs to support those.
When to write long email copy? Cynthia Edwards emailInsider gave some guidelines: Complex or Expensive sale, Building relationships, Introducing New Concepts, and Reselling your product - fire up their imaginations.
As with anything new, the social network ground is littered with significantly more failures than successes. Consider what Evan Gerber says about Facebook. First, membership in groups drops precipitously from the most popular to the least. There is no 'average'. Second, have a real reason -- Mountain Dew, with the right demographics, has relatively few friends. Tickemaster Live has lots of reasons and nearly 100x the number of friends. Third, keep it fresh and this means dedicating hard resources. Fourth, applications need critical mass to start. Finally, search your soul first, during and after the launch.
The influence of media on electronics was reported by BIGresearch shows that New Media is up year over year, while Broadcast Media is down. So while still some of the larger influences TV and Newspaper Inserts are eroding. And the influence of new media is higher among minority groups. Overall word-of-mouth dominates.
Nielsen's PreView allows industry members determine what initiatives the measurement company reports on. A new resource for the community of people looking to understand entertainment marketing. One report was on media mix by movie genre.
From a couple of years ago: "About 2/3 of all economic activity in the U.S. is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service." – McKinsey & Company
Site of the week: www.brandtags.net To see how people perceive a brand, Noah Brier created a site that plays the word association game with brand logos. This is simple, brilliant and way cool.
Sites to add to your daily review of search sites (courtesy of Search Insider). Or from the why didn't I think of that department.
- NearbyNow - search for and reserve products
- ManagedQ - visual search with thumbnails as results
- Quintura - search cloud of related terms
- bippr - twitter length reviews as part of social search
- Dipiti - vertical message board search for a community
- Silobreaker - for those that need a fire hose of results
- Mosio - search based on texting; sounds like a cousin to LinkedIn's search -- ask the crowd
- ChaCha - text a question and a person responds, if they can