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The brandUNITY Team Discusses: Branding tools are evolving at a rapid pace as the internet matures. Always on the watch for new branding powerhouses, in this blog we note revealing research, notable market entries, emerging technologies and trends.
LinkedIn has valued itself at $500 million and both LinkedIn and Facebook are letting employees sell off a portion of their vested stock. LinkedIn reports its annual revenue at $100 million. Facebook for 2007 was $150 million in revenues, but projects this to reach $350 million for 2008. Friendster, largest social network in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia, announced that it raised $20 million in investor funding.
A cool way to connect, LinkedIn Questions and Answers allows for an exchange of ideas between its members on a variety of topics from Advertising and Marketing to Human Resources and Hiring Practices. The threads can be subscribed to by RSS feed, and brandUNITY has captured the real-time discussion on marketing here, on one of our web pages, with our RSS feed aggregator:
Over 23 million professionals are members of LinkedIn, a professional networking site that began in 2003. LinkedIn recently announced it raised $53 million from existing investors, to purchase new ventures and expand online services to business markets, particularly in India and the United Kingdom.
Last year, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, valuing it at $15 billion. LinkedIn is said to be worth $1 billion with this new round of investing.
brandUNITY’s president, Ann Jensen Warman, recently updated her profile and is actively expanding her network. View the profile here: brandUNITY at LinkedIn.
Visa is offering a $100 advertising credit on Facebook, to businesses that sign-up for a free Visa Network membership. brandUNITY did just that and now has its own Visa Business Network page on Facebook, located here: brandUNITY at Visa Network.
Associated Press reported that Visa is paying Facebook $2 million to advertise its credit and debit card processing services on Facebook. Visa aims to help Facebook make headway into business markets, extending social networking features to small-business owners. Facebook began as a social networking tool for college students in 2004 and in 2006 began opening its registration to the general public.
Experiencing exponential growth, in April 2008, Facebook caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, but is said to be lagging somewhat behind MySpace in the US.
For B-to-B professional services concerns, we vote high-five for Facebook Pages and LinkedIn. Immediate results from our new pages has been an increase in the number of downloads of our brandUNITY whitepapers.
Coming up: Internet Strategy Forum Summit, July 17 and 18 in Portland — Presenters from eMarketer, Forrester Research, Disney, Niki share insights on leveraging the internet into overall business strategy. Topics include social media, personalized marketing, e-commerce, email marketing and customer metrics. MORE >>
NBC Universal and News Corporation partnered to launch hulu.com, an online channel with free TV shows, movies and clips. Hulu means “cease” and “desist” in Swahili.
On an online watch-on-demand presentation of “Lost,” an HP commercial prefaces the show, and four short HP clips repeat in regular commercial breaks throughout the show in 22 to 27 second segments. A fifth commercial advertises ABC shows coming up, creating another commercial break in the “Lost” episode.
After each commercial break, a continue arrow appears, allowing the viewer to continue watching only after clicking the button. Commercials can’t be bypassed.
The shows are best viewed with a connection of 2 Mbps or more and fast computer with 128 MB Video RAM and 1 GB. Some of the clips can be embedded on websites or in email.
With Yahoo’s recent rejection of Microsoft’s $42 billion bid, all eyes are on Yahoo. comScore, a leading internet research company, recently posted the January 2008 visitor counts accumulated by vertical market categories across the web.
Interestingly, Yahoo surpassed Google with 138 million visits while Google came in a near second, at 134 million unique visitors. With Microsoft at a distant 119 million, the lead Microsoft could get over Google by acquiring Yahoo is enticing.
Are we in recession or are we not, that is the question. If we are in recession, it stands to reason people would be looking up tax info and career sites. But, why are visits to travel sites up also?
According to comScore.com, tax preparation sites received a 202 percent increase in traffic over December, making it the top gaining category in January. 24.8 million career seekers flocked to CareerBuilder, LLC while by Yahoo! HotJobs attracted 17.4 million, and Monster welcomed 17.1 million visitors. Political websites saw a 65 percent increase to 13.8 million visitors over December 2007.
More curiously, travel sites stats revealed increasing ground/cruise visitor traffic up 27 percent to 11.3 million visitors, car rental sites up 26 percent with 5.1 million visits, and hotels/resort sites up 23 percent with almost 31 million visitors.
So, who plans a big vacations during a recession? The jobless?
Take a look at all the comScore figures across the board here:
With increased the attention on global warming, environmentally conscious consumers are looking for companies that share the same eco-friendly views.
By offering smaller bottles of more concentrated cleaning solutions, plain recycled paper packaging, planting trees and offering more “green” products, these companies are finding that they are not only helping the environment but their bank accounts as well.
According to a Cone Environmental Survey 85% of Americans would switch brands for environmental reasons, and 21% have donated money to save the environment. These “green” consumers are willing to pay more for the eco-friendly products and will more often frequent eco-friendly businesses. By reducing, reusing and recycling businesses can not only help the environment but can attract those environmentally conscious customers that are willing to spend more for a good cause.
Enterprise Rent – A – Car launched a program, Carbon Offset, which offers customers the option to pay a fee of $1.25 per rental that will fund certified offset projects that work to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This cost is based on the average CO2 emissions generated by a rental car operating in their fleet. Their charitable foundation will match customer contributions dollar-for-dollar up to a total of $1 million.
Malloy, a printing company, strives to be both environmentally literate and responsible. They do this by offering recycled paper, ink, and by printing with vegetable or soy based inks.
One of Malloy’s primary ink suppliers, Braden Sutphin Ink Company, provides them with a high quality line of inks called Earth Pride. Braden’s Earth Pride Inks are better than soy inks because they contain no petroleum oil but have 50 percent more linseed oil. Malloy does still use petroleum based inks for specific attributes that soy or vegetable inks can not provide and continue to recycle their ink.
Tide’s newest 2x Ultra laundry detergent is being promoted as having the same “stain fighting” power in a smaller bottle with less water added. They are using up to 43% less plastic, due to it being concentrated and in a smaller bottle, and it contains 44% less water than before. On Tide.com it states that:
By choosing 2X Ultra Tide, you’re showing you care. Not only about your family. But about everyone’s. In fact, a little bottle can make a difference — for today and tomorrow.
MySpace isn’t just for teenagers any more. Social networking will continue to be a key online activity this year, with 44% of US consumers using social networking at least once a month in 2008. MySpace and Facebook will continue dominating the market but there are changes ahead that will extend social networking activities allowing user profiles to become portable. With this portability, consumers will be able to use their single profile in many different places on the internet. Social networking will also be an enhanced feature offered when shopping online, searching and even sending e-mail.
According to Debra Aho Williamson, Senior Analyst with eMarketer.com, Ad spending on social networks is projected to climb from $ 920 million in 2007 to $1.6 billion in 2008, which represents a 70% growth rate. Targeted advertising will continue to cover the bulk of the $1.6 billion, but other forms of social network marketing like advertising, widgets and e-commerce, will catch marketers attention.
Social networking is just one tool that can be used to reach your target market. On these social networks you can post your company bios, blogs, videos and more, to extend company presence.
Stay tuned for more “New Ways to Reach Your Prospects”.
Interesting that Vodafone, the 2nd largest cellular provider, has struck up a deal with YouTube, to offer users the capability of uploading videos from their cell phones. Vodafone also completed a deal with News Corp., so users can edit their MySpace pages via mobile phones.
Bandwidth has got to be a draw-back for the video to YouTube cell connection, at least initially. Yet early computer trends often arrive with speed short-comings that are later surmounted with new technologies, making the early versions exciting, but presumptuous. Trend seems to incentivize technological direction and possibly speed it up, particularly if the economic reward is obvious.
So, if technology is moving to mobile, what will your computing look like two years from now. Will you buy an IPhone or a Q, or something else altogether? It’ll be interesting to watch the competitive shift. Yeah, iPhone.
Forrester predicts that the next wave of cell phone services will include mobile internet in a fixed rate package similar to the was just released in the UK. Attractive to consumers,� the flat-rate service includes calling feature such as connection to the internet and instant messaging. In the UK this combination of services is provided through a partnership of Skype, Yahoo! and Windows Live Messener.
http://www.forrester.com
In the US, Skype is currenting offering free long-distance and local phone service via Voice Over Ip. TeleGeography, a research and consulting firm, reports that though Skpe marketshare is increasing, it is still small when compared to over-all world, long-distance volume. In 2005 Skype provided about 2.9 percent of the international calls, while in 2006 that grew to 4.4 percent. TeleGeography predicts that eventually all calls will be routed over the internet.
Regarding the movement toward television over the internet, YouTube recently announced that its video system will be availble to mobile phones, through an agreement completed with Verizon V CAST. The videos will be viewable on Verizon handsets that are V CAST enabled.
The online advertising market grew by 30% in 2005 to $12.5 billion according the IAB/PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Pew Internet, a research company that studies the impact the internet has on work and life, reports that visits to online classified websites rose by over 80% this year. They also found that 17% of internet users, or 25 million people, have sold things online. Those most likely to sell online are casual users with broadband connections. Of those, 26% are 29 to 40 years old, and 20% of the total are men. 21% of college students sell online.
With regard to podcast downloads, about 12% of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast to listen to later. 26 million Americans use the internet daily for news, and about 42% of Americans now have high-speed internet at home.
With the increase in high-speed access in the home and the rise in classified selling and buying, the prediction that this will be a peak online buying holiday season seems a reasonable speculation and that the online buying trend will continue to increase, particularly in retail, throughout 2007.
