My top 10 reads for the week. This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my weekly media consumption addiction. If you’d like to be on my email list, please email me and I will add you.
5 Lessons Learned From The Front Line – MediaPost article
Don’t let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town – CNN article
29 Million Searches Per Minute: WW SEM Grew 46% in 2009 – ReadWriteWeb article
5 Ways Foursquare is Changing the World – Mashable article
Engagement on Social Networks Top Priority for Marketers – eMarketer article
Learning from Steve Jobs’s Success – Internet.com article
Get Ready for the Post-PC Era – ITBusinessEdge article
Is The IPad Publishing’s Savior? Pro And Con – AdAge article
How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine – Mashable article
Twitter Brings Its Trends Right to Your Neighborhood – FastCompany article
David Veneski Marketing, Social Media Weekly News
Simply…wow. From Silicon Alley Insider:
“According to revenue generated per employee, around $336,000 per quarter, or about $1.34 million per year on an annualized basis.”
David Veneski Google Google, Revenue
Social Networking is, as Charlene Li says ‘Like Air‘ – ubiquitous and everywhere. We are in a culture where every demographic on the planet is involved in some capacity or another. Some of the most visible? Athletes – especially professional athletes. Social Media is a way for the athlete to share a little bit of their ‘off court’ or ‘off field’ persona with those that support them most – their fans. From a fan’s perspective, this is an amazing peek into the everyday lives of their sports heroes. Is it always good for the athlete? No.
In many case – Lance Armstrong, Shaquille O’Neal, and Tony Hawk – their use of social media is positive and often used to make the world a little bit better (Lance promoting Cancer awareness and Shaq using his influence/large following to secure financial relief for disaster victims. I have a lot of respect for these guys as athletes, and even more as humans… they use their widespread influence for good – how can you not be impressed?
Then, comes the flip side. Using social media to make a complete mockery of themselves. Case in point… this week, Portland’s own Greg Oden. There are multiple incidents that are embarrassing for athletes that have a very public persona – and some of the ramifications are career threatening, in the case of Gilbert Arenas. In many cases, it is simply kids making a mistake that is extraordinarily public (Brandon Jennings on Twitter and Video). Remember, these athletes are often times not even of drinking age but making millions of dollars…with plenty of free time on their hands. You know what they say about idle hands…
From my perspective, the moral here for professional athletes to take care with their use of Social Media. You have an incredible opportunity to extend your influence for good and to give the people that ultimately pay your salary (the fans) the ability to take a peek into your ‘off field’ persona. Be careful of what you ‘Tweet’ – it could come back to bite you…
David Veneski Social Media, Sports Athlete, Social Media, Sport
At long last, Intel made the list again for Fortune’s Top 100 companies to work for. For 2010, we come in at #98. It’s been quite some time since Intel has made this list (we were on it from 1998 through 2004 with positions ranging from 65-28), although last year we were recognized as the #23 company to work at in terms of developing strong leaders. A great quote from that recognition was spot on, in my assessment:
“The companies that made the cut have one thing in common: They know that investing in their employees isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.“
David Veneski Intel Fortune Top 100, Intel
Recently Pepsi, a long time Superbowl advertiser (Cyndi Crawford anyone?) announced a switch in their advertising strategy. Rather than spend an estimated $20M in ads for America’s largest sporting event, they would be driving a social media campaign called the Pepsi Refresh Project. AdAge sums up the core tenant of the project:
“Consumers, businesses and nonprofits could then submit their ideas for how to have a positive effect on their community. Pepsi has said it plans to pledge at least $20 million in grants to the effort.”
In short, this campaign is a crowdsourcing effort – not unlike Dell’s IdeaStorm, Best Buy’s IdeaX, and My Starbucks Idea – that channels funds that would have been applied to SuperBowl advertising, into a user identified community giving program.
The difference? Execution. Pepsi’s effort was fraught with privacy and security issues that tarnished the first step of what could be a very good campaign. There is upside however. I think that many people will respect what Pepsi is attempting to do. Rather than spending millions of dollars on less than a minute’s worth of shameless self promotion during the world’s largest sporting event – they are putting those powerful dollars towards programs that will have a positive impact within the community – a generous foray into Cause Marketing. Kudos to them for that.
David Veneski Cause Marketing, Community Crowdsource, Pepsi
According to HubSpot’s recent report ‘State of the Twittersphere‘ Twitter growth has slowed from a high of 13% in March of 2009, to a low of 3.5% in October of 2009.
The upside…the Twitter population is more engaged – with the average user following more people, being followed by more people, and posting more updates than ever before. In addition – those same users are providing more information about themselves consistently – such as location and web address links in their Twitter profile. Here are some additonal key characteristics of the Twittersphere, pulled directly from the report:
• 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
• 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
• Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of
total tweets in our study.
• 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an
average day.
David Veneski Twitter Twitter
A study recently released by UCSD describes in detail the amount of data Americans consume on a yearly basis. A snippet below gives a quick glance at the staggering numbers…
“In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes.“
Artist Rob Vargas puts those numbers in a more visual (and humorous) depiction (via FastCompany):
David Veneski Marketing, Traditional Media Americans, Data Consumption
Every week, I send a growing list of internal and external customers a list of 10 compelling reads for the week. This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my media consumption addiction, but that would be an overwhelming amount of content to share through this means. Each Friday, I’ll post my summary out to a larger audience than my mailing list through this blog. If you’d like to be on my mailing list, please email me and I will add you. Here’s the list for this week:
Tech Boom: Intel’s Earnings Up an Astounding 875% — Mashable article
10 Tips for Becoming a Smarter, Social Business Person — GigaOm article
Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over — ReadWriteWeb article
The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration — Mashable article
The Starbucks Formula for Social Media Success — The Next Web article
In-store facial recognition ads from Intel and Microsoft — Econsultancy article
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s — NYTimes article
Is 2010 Your Year for a Mobile App? — ClickZ article
Nexus One and Android 2.1: Apple Better Watch Out — ReadWriteWeb article
Why Apple Bought Quattro Wireless And Is Getting Into Advertising — Silicon Alley Insider article
David Veneski Marketing, Social Media Weekly News
Twitter has a massive user base and a significant amount of activity flowing through it’s data-center on a monthly basis (22M uniques according to the latest Compete.com site analytics). Those users tweet – a lot. There are a multitude of ‘profiles’ that industry publications have assigned to those that are actively using Twitter. The graphic below (Click Image to Enlarge — courtesy: @ngonews) is great. You’ll get a perspective on the activity of each profile and how you might want to consider your interaction with them – with a humorous bent. I, personally, completely block the ‘b1tch’ – but also have very little patience with the ‘smore’. I’d like to think my profile falls in the category of ‘maven’…but you may have a different opinion when following my Twitter stream. What’s YOUR Twitter profile?
David Veneski Twitter Profile, Twitter
Are you average? Because, if you are – you are viewing a staggering 662 pages on Facebook each month, according to a recent study done by Pingdom. Facebook is the lead horse in the Social Networking race (but we’ve known that for a while). The differentiator for Facebook that sets them above the crop of Social Networking sites on the Web is two-fold. Not only is their user base gigantic (larger than the entire population of the United States), but as the chart below (courtesy: Silicon Alley Insider) clearly shows – they are a very loyal lot as well. Loyal not just to the destination on Facebook, but as WebProNews shows – it is also the largest generator of referral traffic to sites outside of FB.com…effectively matching the combined referral traffic generated by Google and Bing. The moral? Size matters….but so does commitment. You’ve won if you have both.
David Veneski Facebook Facebook, Loyalty, Referral
