So ClickZ is reporting on a new study by Epsilon who is a, you guessed it, e-mail marketing provider shows that marketing e-mail open rates have gone up recently.

The “Epsilon Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report found open rates hit 22.1 percent in the first quarter, up 11.2 percent from the rate of 19.9 percent the researchers found in Q1 2008. The study was compiled from 6 billion e-mails sent to more than 200 clients by Epsilon in January, February and March, and it combines data from both the company’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail.

In addition, deliverability is up slightly in Q1 ’09 over Q1 ’08 (94.1 to 93.4 % respectively) and the open rates have gone up in 12 of the 16 measured industries year over year. Doing well is financial services with 31% open rate and doing not so well is retail apparel at 14.3%.

Critical components of successful e-mail marketing are content, timing and frequency, list hygiene and list growth. Company sources also see “savvy use by marketing departments of transactional and trigger-based messaging such as purchase confirmations, statement-ready alerts, and flight confirmation letters to deliver marketing content.”

The next bit of data I find somewhat hard to believe involves purchases that are attributed to e-mails.

Another recent Epsilon study found that 59 percent of Asia Pacific consumers made offline purchases as a result of e-mails. That figure was 53 percent for North Americans and 37 percent for Europeans, said Epsilon. “Sophisticated marketers are incorporating triggers, transactions, preferences, segmentation and other advanced analytics to produce more successful campaigns,” the report said.

For you e-mail marketing pros out there do these numbers sound on target? Am I just one of those folks that probably won’t be reached by e-mail while the rest of the world is waiting with bated breath for the next sales pitch in their inbox? Do tell.

Malone said he didn’t think that an advertising model made sense on Twitter, but there was some hope for a subscription model. “Sooner or later people will be willing to pay for these services,” he said. Warren Buffett privately told him that he would pay $5 a month for YouTube, he added.

Murdoch, on the other hand, was pretty firm in his beliefs on the latest social media hit: “Be careful of investing here,” he said of Twitter.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams was in the audience, but declined to comment during or after the session. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the conference has a tendency to dub an Internet star child each year—such as YouTube’s Chad Hurley, just months before Google acquired the site for $1.65B.

So is this a prelude to an acquisition for Twitter? Signs point to no:

Asked if he was considering buying Twitter, Murdoch said, “No.” Asked about selling MySpace, he said, “Hell no.”

After the meeting, the moderator of that session, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, said overall the conference was “interesting but gloomy.” Kinda sums up the atmosphere everywhere, eh?

What do you think? Is Murdoch protesting too much, or is he not interested in buying Twitter? Will someone else make an offer—and what will Twitter say?

Photo (it’s a sun setting in a valley—get it, Sun Valley? Setting sun? Old media moguls?) by gorbould

Yeah, well, I hate it. I’ve always hated the idea and I had a really hard time understanding how the ICANN, the organization that arbitrates Internet domain names, could reject the .xxx TLD two years ago and turn around to make it—and almost anything else—okay now. (Their reasoning for rejecting it at the time, compliance and “public-policy concerns,” doesn’t seem to have been resolved in the interim.)

But porn has nothing to do with why I hate this idea—and nothing to do with the ICANN’s still-shoddy logic. According to Slate, they’re doing this to help with the all-new (not) problem of cybersquatting:

Now ICANN, the international body in charge of domain names, says it has a way to rid the Web of cybersquatting. . . .

ICANN argues that adding new descriptive domains will reduce the chance for confusion. . . . And while cybersquatting is already prohibited by trademark law in many countries, including the United States, ICANN promises to implement a strict international review process to prevent miscreants from registering names that they shouldn’t own. Only Facebook will be allowed to manage the .facebook domain, for example, and if someone tries to buy Slate.webmagazine, Slate’s lawyers will be able to shut it down in a jiffy.

Worse still, Slate says, “ICANN’s plan to sell all these new top-level domains at very high prices—tens of thousands of dollars or more—seems like a scam.” Ouch.

Furthermore, site owners are becoming “more adventurous” in their domaining. Slate cites Icanhascheezburger.com and del.icio.us (though they note the upgrade to delicious.com) as examples of this.

Most of all, Slate argues, if this is supposed to stop cybersquatting, the new TLDs are too late. Very few people even bother remembering website URLs these days, relying instead on Google to find “Match.com” or “General Motors.” (Which, by the way, is yet another reason to invest in SEO.)

In fact, I think that allowing these TLDs will make it harder for us to remember any websites’ URLs. It’s going to increase our dependence on search engines to find the right website for General Motors

What do you think? Will you be investing in .butter, or are you rolling your eyes along with me?

OK, so explain this mysterious “public service tweet” that’s started showing up on Twitter:

Actually, Biz Stone has explained it and he says it’s not an ad, just a way to help users upgrade to a browser that supposedly will ensure a “better Web experience on Twitter.”

<Crosses arms, tilts head>

Really? OK, I’ll buy that these are nothing more than a PSA, but I’ll also give it 6 months before ads start showing up in the exact same place–maybe even linked to the #hashtags you’ve clicked on. Oh wait, you didn’t realize that Twitter made #hashtags clickable, so it could track your interests?

These types of ads work well on many free apps that Twitter users download to their desktops and, just like Google tests new ads placements before deciding if they should be fully released, I believe Twitter is testing the engagement levels of these ads messages.

So after a month, where are we? We knew that Bing was growing, but the numbers being released tonight tell a tale of success, as Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the web.

It doesn’t matter who you are or how down on Microsoft you can get that is not a bad start. Sure, much of the early success can be attributed to the $100 million in advertising etc but that’s why companies do those kinds of things, right? Microsoft must feel at least a little joy from seeing this kind of reaction out of the gate. After all, there were more than a handful of folks who felt that the whole Bing thing would be a ginormous fail but that appears to be just some of the usual Microsoft ‘nay saying’ at this point in time.

So early on, and with the obvious benefit of a ton of Bing buzz, Bing had more US visitors in June than Digg, Twitter and CNN. We all need to take a deep breath though before we anoint Bing a true success.

Where will the search decision engine be in the 4th quarter as the online holiday shopping season progresses (or doesn’t since this year already looks like it might be a dud)? Will the professed strengths of Bing really make an impact thus influencing search behavior which then turns into market share gain against Google and Yahoo? Those are the better questions but for now we’ll let Microsoft have a restrained celebration for this good start.

But Technorati is fighting back. With Twitter. Launching today, Twittorati is Technorati’s latest effort to make us think they’re still relevant. The site aggregates the tweets of bloggers in the Technorati Top 100. (They don’t, however, explain why you’d want to do this. Too lazy to read their blogs?)

Twittorati integrates with both Twitter and Technorati, but there’s not a lot of crossover. For example, this pane of the right-most column of the site:

I expected the Technorati tags there would segment the Tweets shown by the genre of the blog author—but the tags led straight to the Technorati tag page. (Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra tells TechCrunch that the capability I wanted is in the works.)

While this might attract some attention for @Twittorati, ultimately I don’t think this is going to help Technorati regain its popularity or find the following it once had.

What do you think? Is Twittorati worth watching? Will it help bring Technorati back to the fore of social media?

Most of the time, websites rely on a static set of directions and maybe a street-level map graphic to help potential visitors to a brick-and-mortar location. And of course, a lot of locations require multiple sets of directions: “From I-85, coming from Durham,” “From I-85, coming from Greenville,” “From I-40 coming from Raleigh,” “From I-40 coming from Chapel Hill,” “From 147 coming from RTP,” “From 147 coming from downtown Durham.” And if you’re not local, you may have no idea which of those directions you should be taking. The gadget may be able to help visitors find your b&m location, especially if you’re relying on directions like those for now.

With the new directions gadget, you get to select the designated “to” part of the directions. Once you’ve embedded the gadget on your site, your visitors set the “from” and Google provides turn-by-turn directions to your prepopulated physical address:

As with all other Google directions, in many areas there are also walking and public transit directions. The embeddable gadget is available in 23 languages.

What do you think? Will you or your clients find this feature useful? Will it bring in more visitors to brick and mortars?

The sad thing is that even of the economy comes back strong at some point this century newspapers may not even see improvement because it’s the medium, not the economy, which is the biggest culprit in the agonizing demise of a once vibrant industry. The chart below shows just how bad things are for the newspaper industry and there is little hope for recovery.

Only one category saw a revenue bump in over the 5 year span studied and that was the smallest of the small papers. There are many possible reasons for this including the lack of online hyperlocal content thus allowing the paper to still be relevant as well as the lower overhead. But is this just delaying the inevitable?

One major reason for the little guys still holding some ground is the classifieds. I personally never look at the classifieds for much of anything so I am a little surprised by this

Another sign of hope: small papers still have a hold on classifieds. Average classified sales for small papers have actually gone up, at a time when they have been declining for most papers. Inland cites an example of a daily newspaper with a circulation of less than 15,000, which posted a 210.4% increase in classified revenue from 2004 to 2008. But it didn’t do much good. The paper’s profits were down by almost 30%.

Now the paper’s profits were down 30% which still means that they were profitable. Now, we’re getting somewhere. This data, however, is just like most where it can be a bit misleading. Considering the sources were the papers themselves and the information was offered voluntarily and with anonymity there may be room for some fudging. Also, there was no recognition of who suffered tremendous losses and who fared OK. The numbers can best be seen as an average.

Who really knows the real deal but there is certainly not a lot of room for celebration. When you have to concentrate on who suffered the least then you have to figure that no matter where a paper is on the scale of size there is not a tremendous amount of hope for the future.

Two years after that data was released, new numbers from Nielsen suggest that trust in others has increased dramatically. In fact, 90% of consumers now trust recommendations from people they know.

The chart below demonstrates the Nielsen numbers from 2007 (in yellow) and the point difference in 2009.

For example, in 2007, 78% trusted recommendations from people known. In 2009, that number grew by 12 percentage points to 90%.

What’s interesting is that brand sponsored/built content is making great improvements in trust. However, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of traditional media–trust in newspaper opinions actually declined!

(Hat-tip @ChrisWinfield)

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

As you may (or may not), know, Aardvark allows you to ask questions and receive answers back from real people in your network. Well, TechCrunch is reporting that  ‘vark now lets you ask questions from within Twitter:

For now, the integration only includes asking questions – if you add @vark to the end, Aardvark picks it up and adds it to your account. In future versions, they may try to integrate responses from Twitter directly into Aardvark as well.

As of yet, Aardvark isn’t tapping into Twitter to source the actual answers, but will get back to you via direct message with your answer. It looks something like this:

Actually, that’s exactly how it looks!

You can read more about it at the official announcement or watch the TechCrunch video below.

Have you used Aardvark? Will this Twitter integration actually make the service more useful?

"…cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, [and] a publisher awakening…"

So says Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk in a new five year interactive marketing forecast.

In fact, a whopping 60% of marketers plan to take money away from traditional marketing and spend it on interactive ads instead.

And, if you’re a search marketer, Forrester has great news for you! As much as 59% of that interactive spend will go towards SEO and PPC, with both niches likely to double in size over the next 5 years!

What about an operation system for netbooks? What about a first step toward a desktop OS? Google is all about the browser and the world available to everyone through it. If there is a way to stir up a little conversation around plans of world domination this is a great one. You have your pick of the litter regarding sources of information on this one. The Official Google blog’s intro to this announcement is as follows

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Well, slap me silly and call Microsoft antiquated! Not directly, of course, because that would be rude. It’s always more fun to play guerilla insults with your biggest rivals by letting your readers connect the dots. “Designed in an era where there was no web”. Hit! You sunk my battleship! Microsoft has owned the OS world forever and Google basically said that despite many new versions etc. that they are no further along than they were pre-web. Well struck.

The New York Times writes

Google’s plans for the new operating system fit its Internet-centric vision of computing. Google believes that software delivered over the Web will play an increasingly central role, replacing software programs that run on the desktop. In that world, applications run directly inside an Internet browser, rather than atop an operating system, the standard software that controls most of the operations of a PC.

That vision challenges not only Microsoft’s lucrative Windows business but also its applications business, which is built largely on selling software than runs on PCs.

An excellent point is made by a Silicon Valley insider

The company likely saw netbooks as a unique opportunity to challenge Microsoft, said Larry Augustin, a prominent Silicon Valley investor who serves on the board of a number of open-source software companies.

“Market changes happen at points of discontinuity,” Mr. Augustin said. “And that’s what you have with netbooks and a market that has moved to mobile devices.”

Google is jumping on a sea change movement that throws a door open to walk through and punch Microsoft in the gut. it looks like it’s going to be “Game On!” between the two giants as this race heats up. Even with Google’s market status and deep pockets it has a long road ahead of it. Many others have tried and failed at knocking Microsoft of this particular perch. If there is a company that has the chops to do it, though, it’s Google.

cnet news reports about some patents that Amazon has filed in the not so distant past that point to a way or them to deliver an e-book with the traditional book. By putting together ad supported e-books and bundling them at little or no additional cost to the reader Amazon moves a step closer to changing the way people read in the future.

The Kindle and other e-readers require a paradigm shift for those who are not inclined to try new technology just because it is new. Just like people who say that they always want to open a newspaper and get ink on their hands, there are folks who feel that reading one book at a time is just fine and there is no need to carry a library in their pocket. Those pesky traditionalists are the folks that Amazon needs to introduce to the e-book concept in a way that gently nudges them to a new behavior that they wouldn’t otherwise try on their own.

Amazon Technologies, a subsidiary of Amazon, filed for a patent (”Method and system for access to electronic version of a physical work based on user ownership of the physical work”) in December 2006. It was approved last month and makes it possible for buyers of a physical book to have an e-book bundled with it.

But two additional patents, filed a year later by Amazon employees (and not yet approved), are the more interesting ones: these, according to MediaPost, “clearly note that Amazon would insert advertisements throughout the e-books, from the beginning to the end, between chapters or following every 10 pages, as well as in the margins.”

I have to admit that I really don’t care if ads are inserted in books because I have developed such severe ad blindness that I might not even blink. Imagine the day though when the ad is actually part of the story, like product placement in the movies. That’s when the real fun begins.

So do you think having an ad in your book is too much? Have you made the switch yet or are you going to be OK with having a few trees die for your reading enjoyment? Now that wasn’t fair was it?

Yahoo has been testing the feature — which allows users to save and take notes on search results they want to revisit — since February, when it first described it in this blog post. Yahoo describes it as a great way to keep track of Web pages related to planning a vacation or renovating a home.

That description pigeon-holes the service to a degree. I tried to get the service to initiate doing a search for laptops and got nothing. Apparently Yahoo felt that my searches for Major League Baseball stadiums deserved the recognition of Search Pad. Interesting result right out of the gate but at least it started for me.

The Digits blog gives the following rundown of just what Search Pad does

The service works like this: Search Pad detects when users appear to be conducting research-related searches based on patterns in their search queries, such as sequential searches for “ski vacations,” “cheap lift tickets” or “weather Colorado,” for instance. Then it asks them if they want to start saving the results, and if so, saves the links a user clicks on a separate screen where they can also jot down some notes like “useful snow report site.” Users who are logged in can access their links and notes another time and share them with friends.

As for the application of the service? To the user goes the usage, I suppose. I can see some value but at the same time I am not sure that I would take the time to save information that I am trying to get on the fly in most cases.

Here’s the real question. Will the service be any enticement at all to draw people from the pull of the planet Google or from the newness of bing? It is probably best suited for those people who use Yahoo as their primary search engine already. With Yahoo’s push to create more community through their rebranding efforts of the near future they need to ensure that people stick around for the new Yahoo. Right now, all of the buzz is going to the other guys and that’s not good news for Yahoo.

Have you tried Search Pad yet? If so chime in. If you haven’t yet, do you plan to in the future? Yahoo would love to know.

Oddly enough, the list of unbetaed apps coincides exactly with the list of betaed apps TechCrunch was complaining about in May. But as the NY Times reports, there’s more to it than just TC’s criticism:

Practically speaking, the change will mean precious little to Gmail’s millions of users. But it could help Google’s efforts to get the paid version of its package of applications, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other products, adopted inside big companies. Corporate technology managers tend to shy away from beta products, and Google wants to remove any barriers to adoption that it can.

“For business customers, it is an important sign in terms of the maturity of our product offering and commitment to this business,” [a Google director of product management, Matt] Glotzbach said. “I’ve had C.I.O.s tell me that they would not consider a product labeled ‘beta.’”

Gmail anticipates some “gamma anxiety,” so they’ve added a new experiment to labs—to add back the little gray “BETA” to your Gmail logo. (And we all know how they like their silly lab apps!)

What do you think? Will dropping the Beta label help Google gain enterprise acceptance? Will you add the beta back your Gmail, just so you can continue to ridicule its half-decade in beta?

(Hat-tip)

Yep, Google’s making a land grab with Google Maps, as SEL cleverly puts it. You can find real estate listings by entering the term “real estate” or bringing up the search options (the link to the right of the search button on Google Maps) and selecting Real Estate from the pull down menu. Type in a location and you get a map with results, the options to narrow your search in the left panel, and the first ten listings below that. (Also note the text ad at the bottom of the map.)

Naturally, Google also has listings for the individual properties. Aside from vital stats, however, the listings don’t offer much.

The feature has also launched in Australia and New Zealand. House Hunters International, anyone?

Hitwise reports on Google’s growth in this area:

Hitwise data reveal that last week, Google Maps sent 2% of its US traffic to websites in the Real Estate industry, making it the #19 downstream industry (among more than 160). Yahoo! Real Estate, Realtor.com and Trulia all accounted for a larger volume of traffic to real estate listings than did Google Maps.

These other real estate sites currently offer many more social features—property comparisons, values over time, etc. But since this is just the beginning for Google, I foresee plenty of growth in this area.

What do you think? Will Google work to make this product more full-featured, or is this just a side offering of Google Maps?

It’s enough to send any marketer running for the hills, but really it’s only those knee-deep in old school channels that need to worry. As the chart below indicates, online advertising, email marketing, and social media are the least hit, with TV, print and radio seeing a whopping 67% decrease!

Scratching below the surface, we see even more good news for new media marketers. While 7% of CMOs plan to spend less on social media, 47% plan on increasing their spend in this area! The same goes for web site development, online advertising, and email marketing–all seeing more budget increases than decreases.

Regardless of where the money is being spent, marketers are feeling more pressure than ever to deliver results.

Of those who responded, 51% said marketing has a key role in enhancing revenue while 41% agreed that marketing’s efforts are being watched at all levels of the company.

Yep, that sounds like the daily grind for us marketers. You reduce our budgets but expect us to do more with what little you give us!

Want all the data? You can buy a copy of the report here.

iStrategyLabs spent the last six months collecting user demographic data and discovered the number of users over the age of 55 soared from 1 million to nearly 6 million. During the same 6 month period, high school and college users dropped by as much as 22%!

Here’s the breakdown:

At the same time Facebook continues to gray, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen–a Facebook board member–suggests the social network could realize revenue of $1 billion if it would only push harder with its advertising.

"This calendar year they’ll do over $500 million..If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year…There’s every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now," Andreessen said.

What’s interesting is that the 15-24 year olds are the ones that helped Facebook become the juggernaut it is today, but when you have champagne revenue goals while your audience has a beer budget, you need those with established incomes to pay the bills–or in this case, click on the ads.

Perhaps the key question is can Facebook continue to grow while losing its vocal youth? Arguably, high school and college users were the ones that evangelized Facebook to their older friends and family. Without them, will Facebook’s growth–and revenue–stall?

Then, the boxes began carrying info on Twitter apps. Rather than paying for their placement, the featured apps were actually approached by Twitter. The apps being advertised didn’t pay to get there, so despite the fact that they were still called “sponsored definitions,” they weren’t ads. Nope, no way, nuh uh.

Well, now they are, apparently. Read Write Web reports that two of the “sponsored definitions,” for Cinema Tweets and the infamous ExecTweets, are really ads this time.

As RWW notes, these ads appear only on your Twitter homepage when you’re signed in, not on other Twitter users’ pages. However, since this ad format has been used since March, it’s possible that Tweeple will either a.) completely ignore the ads, just like the did the previous definitions, or b.) not realize these are ads, despite the “sponsored” marking (though we’ve seen that before ).

What do you think? Are these really ads, or are they just more of the same? Will Twitter users click on ads unwittingly, ignore them completely, or somewhere in between?

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(Don’t worry, you didn’t miss out. It is a scam.)

Screencap by Barry Schwartz

Though these ads have been appearing for months, Google has finally started to crack down on them. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google is banning ads with keywords that look related to these AdWords scams. They’re also taking action against the account owners, according to an email to an advertiser posted Google AdWords Help thread:

It’s come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we’ve made the decision not to accept these ads.

This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.

Apparently Google started the strict enforcement of this part of the guidelines on July 1.

What do you think? Is this crack down going to help protect more victims of the scams, or is it just Google covering itself?