Marc Ohmann’s Blog

Nothing surprising in the report but a recent ICM survey for the BBC reports that nearly half of the people who do watch video online spend less time watching TV.

From the article:

“In the near future, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 will distribute most of their shows on demand over the Internet. The on-demand aspect, as Goodman noted, is bound to make the greatest impact in the future.” 

With that statement, how can anyone wonder why Google would want to own the largest on-demand video site.

An interesting statistic for those marketing to the under 25 crowd.

Have you been noticing an increase in spam levels recently?  I know my spam folder is hit with hundreds a day not to mention the 10 or more penny stock ads I have to delete from my inbox every morning.  Well your not alone.  According to U.S. email security company Postini, 9 out of 10 emails sent worldwide are considered spam.  This number has tripled since June and now represents approximately 7 billion emails per month.

Some of your customers or prospects don’t have time to read the direct mails, emails, etc that you send them.  Some of them don’t know the first thing about how to download your podcasts and listen to your message.  Despite these limitations, how many in your audience do you think carry a cell phone and have possibly 5 minutes at some point during the day to listen to and watch your message?

Enter Google + YouTube + Verizon

According to this article over at Information Week, by the year 2011 four industries will make up over half of the online ad spending — totalling $11.5 billion.

Not a real shock but the four industries will be:

• Media and Entertainment
• Financial Services
• Travel
• Auto

This reminds me of some content from one of my speeches where I quote a CMO from one of the big 3 auto cos as stating that 2 years ago 10% of their marketing budget was spent online, today 30% is spent online and in 2 years over 50% will be spent online.  I might have my years mixed up there but its the general idea.

Since ExactTarget doesn’t seem to provide a list of all variables that can be used in an email, I came across the info and thought others might find it useful.

Anyhow, here they are. I haven’t used all of them but they are pretty self explanitory.

Member_Addr
Member_Busname
Member_City
Member_Country
Member_PostalCode
Member_State
MemberID
MemberID_
NameEmail_
profile_center_url
Status
subscription_center_url
unsub_center_url
view_email_url
List_
XTDAY
XTDAYOFWEEK
XTMONTH
XTYEARMember_Busname
Member_Addr
Member_City
Member_State
Member_PostalCode

Popularity: 5% [?]

Despite some website problems at walmart.com, macys.com, footlocker.com and others online retailers saw a 42% increase in sales year over year according to comScore Networks — a Global Internet Information Provider.

Thanksgiving Day visits were also up over 11% compared to last year according to Hitwise.

According to Hitwise:

“Wal-Mart drew 18.26% of the market share of visits on the Hitwise index of 100 Web sites, while Best Buy accounted for 8.75%. Amazon.com, Circuit City, and Target rounded out the top five for market share on the index, with 8.36%, 6.98%, and 6.06%, respectively.”

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. And basically it allows readers to subscribe to information they are interested in receiving. Although RSS has been around since mid 1999, it has only recently gained popularity as a mainstream business tool.

Here we will run through some of the reasons you should consider implementing RSS on your site to help your business.

Have you ever sent out an RFP for a web project and been amazed at the wide range pricing in the proposals that come back? It is not uncommon for us to consult with a company who has received proposals that vary by an order of magnitude or more in price. It’s not that one company is wrong or one is right. It’s simply that there are so many ways to attack a web project and really your results are generally only controlled by how much you invest — as long as you are investing in each of the 6 areas below.

As I wait for the my phone to die so I can buy my dream phone. I am forced to surf the web through my old palm phone which doesn’t display many web pages well. After posting on the Google transcoder I was playing with some settings in Google Reader when I noticed a url for Google Reader Mobile. Now everyone can read their favorite feeds anywhere.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Ever wonder what your site looks like in a mobile device?  If your site doesn’t display well on a mobile device and is located through Google search, the site will often be sent through the Google transcoder before rendering.

You can view your site through the transcoder at www.google.com/m

Popularity: 7% [?]