Media Buying: Understanding Media Usage by Generation

Date: 2011.09.27 | Category: advertising, market planning, marketing strategy, social media, web marketing | Response: 1

One of the greatest marketing challenges small businesses face is how to stretch their limited advertising budget. As the number of media channels continue to grow, understanding your customers’ media habits are more important than ever. Large companies rely on extensive market research to gain a better understanding of their customers’ habits. That research drives their media buying strategy.

As a small business, you probably don’t have a budget to commission extensive market research. However, small business owners intrinsically know their customers. Your demographic research is through observation of day-to-day operations. Through that, you know basic demographics – age, sex, ethnicity and, to some extent, their income levels. That can help you narrow down your media buys, but doesn’t really help you prioritize your media channels. For instance, if your customer is spending most of their reading articles the web, you don’t want to spend most of your budget on print. If you customer is listening to iTunes, radio advertising is not going to reach them.

Luckily, Ad Age and MBAOnline.com have worked together to study media usage by generation and day part. By understanding your customer’s media habits, you can better determine how to budget your media buys.

Created by: MBA Online

Web Icon Cheat Sheet

Date: 2011.09.20 | Category: public relations, SEO, social media, web marketing | Response: 7

Most of us use the web every day and know the most popular icons, but what about the rest? Here is a quick reference on common web and social media icons, a description of their sites, links and statistics.

Social Media

FaceBook

The largest social networking site with more than 750 million users worldwide. Originally designed to connect college students, now over 41% of the US population own a FaceBook account.

Business: FaceBook offers free pages and apps for businesses. To “own” a page (i.e. facebook.com/mycompany), you need to have at least 25 people “like” your page.Common apps (or plugins) for business includes adding buttons on your company’s website to allow visitors to “like” your website, “refer” your site to friends, “make a comment.” The activity shows on the users private page and sometimes can be coded to also show on the company’s page (depending on the facebook user’s privacy settings).

FaceBook also offers paid advertising services.

Twitter

Social media micro-blogging that allows users to send and read text-based posts up to 140 characters known as tweets.Twitter currently has 200 million users worldwide.Tweets can also contain links to blogs, articles and videos (and can be automatically linked to your other social media accounts).

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media site for professional/ business networking (connecting through current and past employers, trade associations or profession) with 120 million users worldwide.

MySpace

Originally designed for a music and entertainment audience, MySpace was the number one social networking site until it was overtaken by FaceBook in 2008. By 2011, MySpace active users has dwindled to 63 million.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a service allows you to subscribe to news and updates from your favorite websites from one website (and allows companies to syndicate their news). The top RSS websites are Google Reader and  Bloglines.

YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing website (owned by Google). Unregistered users can watch videos. Registered users can watch, upload and share videos.There are over 500 million YouTube unique users worldwide on YouTube with more than 13 billion videos.

WordPress

WordPress is an open source blog tool and website publishing platform. Using customizable web templates, WordPress is the most popular content management system on the internet. (The latest version has been downloaded 32.5 million times). WordPress offers two hosting options. The first is hosted free through them (using the wordpress domain) and the second is self-hosted using your own domain name.

Joomla

Joomla is a Free open-source web content management system (similar to WordPress).

De.li.cious

De.li.cious is a social media bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. In 2008, they claimed more than 5.3 million users with 180 bookmarks.

Digg

Digg is a social news website that allows users to vote a story up or down. Digg has 7.2 million unique monthly visitors.

Blogger

Blogger is a free blog puplishing service offered by google.Blogger allows individuals and companies to publish articles (blogs) and allows users to read, comment, and share articles. It also offers widgets (apps) including  links to websites, YouTube, RSS, and polls.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz is a social networking, microblogging  and messaging tool from Google that is integrated into the company’s web-based email program, Gmail. Users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in “conversations” and visible in the user’s inbox.

Flickr

Flickr is a image (picture) and video hosting website that offers web services suite and an online community. It hosts over 6 billion images and has 19 million unique visitors per month.

Reddit

Reddit is a social news website woned by Conde Nast Publishing. It is the top social news website with over 8 million unique visitors and over 429 million page views per month.Users have the option to submit links to content on the Internet or submit “self” posts that contain original, user-submitted text. Other users may then vote the posted links “up” or “down” with the most successful links gaining prominence by reaching the front page. In addition, users can comment on the posted links and reply to other commentators consequently forming an online community. Reddit users (also referred to as redditors) may create their own topical sections, known informally as subreddits and officially as reddits, for which to submit their links and to comment, while appealing to a specific niche.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos (using thumbs up, thumbs down) that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles

StumbleUpon has 15 million unique users.

Bebo

Bebo stands for Blog Early, Blog Often. It is a site similar to FaceBook that was purchased and sold by AOL. Bebo has about 10 million unique visitors a month and its strongest market is the UK.

Orkut

Orkut is a social networking website owned by Google. It has 66 million users worldwide (58% of its users are in Brazil, 32% in India and 2% in Japan).

Technorati

Technorati is an internet search engine for searching blogs. They currently have 473,000 unique monthly visitors.

Furl (now Diigo)

Furl (from File Uniform Resource Locators) was a free social bookmarking website that allowed members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others. Furl has recently rebranded to Diigo.

Dribble

Dribble is a social network and works sharing for creatives.

FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a web feed management service. Provides custom RSS feeds and management tools for bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet  users can keep a blog, journal or diary. It has 8.7 million users worldwide. Owned by Google.

Newsvine

Newsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press.

Users can write articles, seed links to external content, and discuss news items submitted by both users and professional journalists.

Yelp

Yelp is a social network, user review and local search engine with 54 million unique monthly visitors.

ShareThis

ShareThis is a freeware platform that allows users to share websites with each other through widgets. There are 400 million ShareThis users worldwide.

Search Engines

Google

67.9% of searches

Self explanatory….the top search engine that owns many of the most popular social media networks including YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, Google Buzz, Google Reader, Google Checkout, Google +1, FeedBurner, Orkut and and more.

Google had 1 Billion unique users per year, but has recently lost 15% of their market share from 2010 to 2011. Google currently has 136 million unique visitors per month and has 67% of the search engine market.

Google’s query volume has increased 7.1$ month-over-month, but is down 11,4% overall.

In 2010, FaceBook overtook Google as the most visited website in the US. (Facebook has more pages visited with a longer time on the site).

Bing

13.8% of searches

Microsoft’s Bing search engine (which includes bing.com and bing-powered searches) currently has 29% of the US search market. Bing  has 96 million unique visitors per month.

Yahoo!

13.4% of searches

Yahoo! currently has 80 million unique visitors per month (down 13.8% from the previous year). Their query volume has increased by 6.6%

Ask

2.6% of searches

Ask has 60 million unique visitors per month.

AOL

AOL has dropped to 1.4% of all searches.

Chat and Communication

Gmail

Gmail is the free email service from Google with 170 million users. Gmail interfaces with most of google’s products including Google Chat. Google Buzz and Google Voice.

Gmail is currently losing email accounts to the Cloud*

*Cloud computing allows users to share resources, software and information over the internet vs storing it on your personal computer. Cloud computing is offered by most major computer and internet access companies including MicroSoft, Apple, Dell, AT&T, Symmantic, Oracle, Intel, etc.

Hotmail

Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft.

AIM

AIM is  Aol free instant messaging and email service.

Skype

Online chat, instant messaging and voice and video over internet.

gTalk

gTalk or Google Talk is Google’s freeware voice over internet software.

These icons are but a few of the many icons you’ll find on the web. If  you’re curious about an icon you’ve seen or would like your favorite included on the list, please feel free to leave us a comment and we’ll get it up as soon as possible.

Welcome to Marketing 101

Date: 2011.09.16 | Category: advertising, branding, market planning, marketing strategy, social media, web marketing | Response: 3

Small businesses are truly the foundation of our economy. They are the innovators and the job producers. They are invaluable to the communities they serve. And, they need all the help they can get to compete both locally and nationally with large businesses.

With that in mind, we created our forum. Our goal is to provide basic marketing and advertising training to entrepreneurs so they have a few tools for success without breaking the bank.

Our topics will range from strategic market planning (including budgeting, media buying and branding strategies) to web marketing (copy writing, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns) and market research.

Our forum is open for you to share your success stories with other entrepreneurs and we also welcome feedback and requests to cover specific topics.

Eva Medcroft
President

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Established in 2002, Altitude Agency is a full service marketing consulting, public relations and advertising firm that specializes in small business and start-up companies. For a free consultation for your business, contact us at 505-280-0095