A Content Curation Case Study

sme_bw2010_adam_ostrow_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.
Content curation (assembling content produced by third-party sites) has become a hotter topic lately, as more brands move to more active roles in content marketing. Here's an analysis of how "Mashable" succeeded by curating lots of content.

Casual News Users Referred by Google, Other Search Engines; Facebook a Factor Sometimes

A new report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism provides new evidence of the role Facebook now is playing in driving traffic to media sites. "Casual users" who are those more likely to be drawn to major news stories now make up the majority of the online news audience.

Google is still the main outside entry point, driving on average 30 percent of a news site's traffic. About 60 percent to 65 percent of visits are from direct traffic.

In 2010, all but one of the top sites for which there was referral data derived at least some of their audience through Facebook.

Facebook ranked as the second- or third-highest referral source for six of the largest 25 news sites, with Huffingtonpost.com getting the biggest share of traffic from the social network, at eight percent. NYTimes.com got six percent of traffic from Facebook. Despite its growth, Twitter still isn't a major factor in sending visitors to news sites.

Of course, that last tidbit has a nuance. Heavy Twitter users are more likely to be driven to news sites than heavy Facebook users, one would suspect. Some Twitter users might not be heavy Facebook users, for example, so more of those user redirects would come from Twitter than Facebook. The Pew study might simply be reflective of the bigger Facebook user base.

Facebook Driving Traffic

Half of Consumers Say Fraud Detection is a Reason to Allow Tracking

Privacy, like most other issues, has a dual character. It can provide user benefits and danger. A survey by the Ponemon Institute revealed the majority of consumers are comfortable with online behavioral tracking for fraud prevention purposes, but remain hesitant around advertising and promotional purposes.

About 74 percent of consumers expressed some level of concern about online advertisers collecting and using their information for future promotional activity.

But the survey also showed that half of respondents think it is acceptable to use information about their online behavior as long as it’s used to detect potential fraudsters.

Some 24 percent said they don’t think behavioral targeting in any form is appropriate, whereas 26 percent said it is okay for online businesses to use their information to either send them ads or monitor potential fraudsters.

Tracking Online Behavior: Three in Four Consumers Say Using Their Information For Fraud Detection Purposes is ‘Okay’

Apple The World's Most-Valuable Brand

Apple is the world's most-valuable brand, Millward Brown's 2011 BrandZ study of the most-valuable global brands now shows. Apple ended a four-year run by Google at the top of the brand ranking.

Click image twice for a larger view.

Google now is the second most-valuable global brand, followed by IBM, McDonalds, Microsoft, Coca Cola and AT&T, the top-ranked telecom brand. Vodafone ranks 12th and Verizon 13th. All those telecom firms rank ahead of Amazon.

Apple Ends Google's Four-Year Run as Most Valuable Brand

Rogers to officially become a "4G" Provider

Purists might gnash their teeth, but users mostly won't care that Rogers will change the nomenclature of its HSPA+ "3G" network to "4G" on May 9, 2011.

Effective May 9th Rogers will call its HSPA+ network, technically 3G, a “4G HSPA ” network.

Rogers says this “is simply a network name change” to align with the International Telecommunicaitons Union standards and also to “bring up on par with Bell and TELUS and close the perceived gap”. In other words, the mobile broadband access market has shifted. Despite the fact that most consumers likely could not tell the difference between a 4G and an HSPA+ 3G network, the marketing platform around 4G has become important.

TELUS announced their new “4G” network in February and Bell closely followed in March 2011. Soon after SaskTel and MTS both declared their networks were also being marketed as a “4G” network.

Rogers simply has to keep pace, in the marketing wars. Of course, that also creates another problem, namely how to market 4G in its Long Term Evolution variant.

Verizon Wireless can fairly clearly make an argument that its 4G network differs clearly from its 3G network in terms of speed and latency. It will be a bit harder to draw the distinction between a good HSPA+ network and an LTE network, in many cases, since field tests show an HSPA+ network can offer experienced speeds as high as some LTE networks.

Rogers to officially become a "4G HPSA " network on May 9th | MobileSyrup.com

The Impact of Display Advertising

One mistake easy, in fact, almost impossible to avoid when evaluating the return on investment of display advertising is to attribute buying actions to the "last channel" a customer uses when making a purchase.

By that logic, the best channel a retailer has is a cash register at a store or the ordering function of a website. That's the "channel" we can measure as registering a sale. What is difficult, nearly impossible to measure is all the other influences that have lead up to a purchase. Those influences are, by definition, indirect in the sense that all of them, or some of them, have had a rule in moving a particular buyer to purchase activity.

Some will argue that channels play different roles, at different parts of a buying cycle. Display advertising, word of mouth, recommendations and online content do the "heavy lifting" early in the consumer decision-making process of driving awareness and consideration.

The argument is that prospects often have initial exposure in the research phase that later produces a "buyer." A late-stage visit often gets credited to search marketing, when a user already has made a decision, and is looking for the actual sales channel.

So the temptation is to credit the entire sale to the search channel. That's a mistake of attribution. It can be unknowable how any particular prospect became a buyer, but it likely is the case that multiple information or advertising and promotion channels played a role.

The Impact of Display on Search | ClickZ

"GrouponLive" to Sell Event Tickets

Groupon and Live Nation have a formed a joint venture to develop a new online ticketing deals channel called "GrouponLive."

GrouponLive will serve as a local resource for Live Nation events and clients of its global ticketing business, Ticketmaster.

The site is intended to help consumers to find high-value tickets to concerts, sports, theater, arts and other live events, while serving as a timely and effective way for merchants to sell more tickets.

The new effort will launch in time for the summer concert season, the companies say. One way to look at Groupon is that although it provides a promotional vehicle for retailers, it also is becoming a retail channel in the ticketing business.

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