Amazon’s latest ad play suggests the potential for tablet advertising will only intensify. According to ad industry publication Ad Age, Amazon, flush with Kindle Fire sales, is visiting ad agencies and pitching them on the idea of a major ad program for their clients. Reportedly, Amazon would like to sell an advertising package that includes an ad appearing on Kindle Fire’s welcome screen. The potential price tag: a cool $600,000. And for $1 million, reports Ad Age, an advertiser would not only get more ads but “be included in Amazon’s public-relations push.”

Ads in Preparation for New Amazon Products

Amazon’s ad activity is very likely connected to new products soon coming from the company. In July, according to Reuters, Amazon will launch new versions of both the Kindle and Kindle Fire based on E Ink technology that features front lighting so the e-readers can function in the dark without an additional light source. This is already being offered in the Nook, a competing device from Barnes & Noble. Later in the year, reports Reuters, Amazon plans to come out with an upsized Kindle Fire that might more closely resemble Apple’s iPad.

Amazon has indicated that sales of the Kindle Fire have been on fire since the end of 2011, when it was selling more than a million total Kindle devices on a weekly basis. Potential advertisers will be interested to know that Millennial Media, a mobile ad platform, reported  late last year that the Kindle Fire is logging “hundreds of millions” of user ad impressions every month.

 An Apple-Amazon Media War

While it’s intriguing enough to see the undisputed tablet leader being challenged by the undisputed e-commerce leader, the real story may be the developing media and advertising war between Apple and Amazon. Tablets, after all, are nothing more than windows into applications and the online universe. Apple has done a superb job of building a case for the iPad with its portfolio of applications, many of which subtly and not-so-subtly rely on advertising. Meanwhile, the iPad opens the door into Apple’s media world, encouraging the use of iTunes, iBooks, and the like.

The same can be said of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. I remain convinced that this device is not intended to be a stand-alone product. Last October, I wrote that Amazon is more Google than Apple, creating an online world that uses devices to support it. It’s not about Kindle Fire at all — that’s just an entry point to the gigantic Amazon online world and all it offers. On the surface, Kindle Fire may look like an iPad killer, but I think it’s more akin to Gillette’s legendary razor strategy: You sell the razor so the consumer buys the blades, time and time again. Kindle Fire is Amazon’s razor; its blades are its ever-growing mass of digital content and everything else it has to sell.

Ad Age wonders whether Amazon is moving toward something akin to Apple’s iAD, the ad network that places ads within apps on iPhones and iPads. “Industry sources speculate that Amazon is attempting to build a competitor to iAD,” reports the publication.

Microsoft Joins the Party

There’s another player that recently came to the tablet table. In late April, Microsoft invested $300 million (chump change for the company) in the above-mentioned Nook, a competitor to the Kindle which has also evolved into a tablet. Not surprisingly, the move is all about two things – broadening Microsoft’s content offerings and gaining access to new markets. According to an analysis  of the investment in the Washington Post, “Breaking into the college market – through Barnes & Noble’s many university bookstores – is a smart way to target students who might appreciate a cheaper option than Apple’s iPad for reading e-books. Microsoft could also push what will likely be cheaper tablets running Windows RT.”

Microsoft, a perennial rival, has cooperated with Apple over the years when it was to its mutual advantage. But the Microsoft presence just adds to the bubbling media and advertising cauldron spawned by the popularity of the iPad. Combine the continuing advance of the iPad with Microsoft’s investment in Nook and it’s no wonder that Amazon is trying to grab ad revenue for its Kindle Fire, now rather than later.

A steady debut:

For a record-breaker, Facebook’s long-anticipated stock market debut May 18 lacked much of the drama many had expected. Nonetheless, Facebook’s big week certainly wasn’t devoid of some surprises – including an unexpected upping of its stock price, and even a new acquisition.

While Facebook had previously set a range for their share price between $28 and $35, the company surprised with an amendment to its S-1 filing that set shares above earlier expectations, at $38.

Yet, even as Facebook’s share price rose before its IPO, it remained rather immobile during its first day of trading. To a certain extent the company’s debut disappointed investors, as its stock price remained the same at market’s close as it did at opening.

“From a psychological perspective, Facebook’s performance is a blow. The company’s bankers had to buy shares to keep the stock from falling below its offering price, raising questions about how the stock will fare next week” wrote the New York Times (NYT).

But with the surprise stock pricing of $38, Facebook left very little room for a pop, Dan Veru, Chief Investment Officer at Palisade Capital Management told AdAge:

“They squeezed the lemon dry here [...] They didn’t leave enough on the table. You want to price these things a little lower, so that the shares have better support in the aftermarket.”

It is, of course, difficult to call the debut a complete disappointment. More than 566 million Facebook shares were traded, totaling $16 billion and breaking the record previously held by GM. And the company is trading at about 100 times its earnings.

As Peter Falvey, Founder of advisory firm Falvey Partners told the NYT, “If you’re Facebook, it is hard to be disappointed when you’re one of the 25 biggest companies in the country.”

The toll on other social networks

Of course, Facebook’s IPO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As early as the company’s first few minute of trading, the impact on other social networks’ stock began to show, writes Mashable.

Stock price shot down by 5 percent for LinkedIn, 3.6 percent for Yelp, and for Renren by 11 percent. But Zynga seemed hardest hit, with fall of 13.3 percent to just over $7.

Among the possible reasons, TechCrunch underscores Zynga’s close dependance on Facebook:

“While we can’t know the exact reason why this happened, I’d bet that investors expected Zynga shares to pop alongside Facebook’s during the IPO. But when they didn’t pop at all and instead stayed flat, those short-term investors sold off the social gaming company’s shares. Meanwhile, it seems that other investors had been using Zynga as a proxy for Facebook stock — and now they can move over to buy the real thing.”

Buying Karma

Though many companies would already feel their plate was full enough in the week of their stock market debut, Facebook apparently found the time to make another deal. The newly public company waited until market’s close May 18 to announce it had made a new acquisition – mobile commerce startup Karma, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Karma is a service for sending gifts through mobile devices and, as TechCrunch notes, with its acquisition, “Facebook gets two extremely experienced leaders in building and monetizing mobile apps.”

And though 16 of Karma’s employees will be joining the Facebook team, TechCrunch stresses “This was a real product acquisition, not a lower-priced, talent-based one.”

The deal’s terms were not disclosed.

Yahoo’s Scott Thompson steps down after resumé scandal

Yahoo’s not very long-standing CEO Scott Thompson officially stepped down from his position May 13, following a scandal surrounding his resumé, reports the New York Times.

The issue began when  hedge fund Third Point – a 5.8 percent investor in Yahoo – discovered that Thompson had made false academic claims on his CV prior to taking on the role of CEO at Yahoo.

In Thompson’s stead, Ross Levinsohn will now be taking up the post of Interim CEO, and will in turn shoulder the burden of Yahoo’s recent troubles.

“Despite running some of the most valuable hubs on the Web, the company has struggled for years in its efforts to restore luster and revenues,” writes the New York Times‘ DealBook. “Mr. Levinsohn will be only the latest chief executive facing the tough task of figuring out how to help Yahoo catch up in important areas like mobile devices and social networking.”

To be sure, internal reorganization isn’t the best thing for a company already facing difficulty, but neither is the bad press that comes along with a CEO having lied about his credentials.

“The decision is meant to move Yahoo past one of the most embarrassing episodes in the Web pioneer’s history as the company tries to revitalize itself,” writes DealBook.

Twitter takes stance on privacy with Do Not Track option

Twitter announced May 17 that it will now be supporting users’ right to privacy, with the adoption of the Do Not Track option developed by Mozilla for their browser, Mashable reported.

The feature allows users to opt out of cookies collecting personal data, as well as third party cookies, often used for targeted advertising. Though not exactly foolproof, the feature does offer some degree of privacy protection, provided the companies doing the tracking respect users’ requests not to be tracked.

Still, as the Wall Street Journal notes, “major advertisers said this year that they will begin honoring Do Not Track messages,” though it’s unclear whether doing so will prohibit the from collecting information at all, or whether they just won’t be able to see it in ad targeting.

According to Mozilla, Do Not Track is gaining support across the web, with nearly 9 percent of Firefox desktop users and 19 percent of mobile users opting-in to the feature.

Pinterest gains $100 million in funding

Pinterest, the recent darling of the social media scene, has just announced the gains from its latest round of funding – $100 million.

According to the Wall Street Journal‘s AllThingsD, Tokyo-based Rakuten, the leader of Japan’s largest ecommerce, led the round. But the New York Time‘s DealBook also noted investment from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital, none of which were first time Pinterest investors.

As a result of the new funding, Pinterest’s valuation has just increased to $1.5 billion.

According to AllThingsD, “Rakuten will presumably help advise Pinterest on turning their pretty pictures into purchases, as commerce is already starting to emerge naturally on the site.”

AmEx launches My Offers using purchase history, location

American Express may just be the next big player in the daily deals space.

This week, the company announced the launch of its new My Offers feature, an iPhone app that serves up targeted daily deals on consumers’ location and purchase history.

According to Mashable,  AmEx’s president of the U.S. Consumer Services Group Josh Silverman “acknowledged that the daily deals space — led by Groupon and LivingSocial — is crowded. But the company sees an opportunity to use its customer purchase data to come up with more relevant offers.”

It’s certainly a considerable advantage in a space where success is so dependent on targeting the right offers to the right consumers.

And, though other daily deals services, like Groupon, have attempted to gauge consumers’ preferences by asking for responses to the deals they’ve been offered, purchase history is likely to be a much more dependable indicator of users’ tastes.

Google’s new Knowledge Graph

May 16, Google launched what TechCrunch has called “one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months.”

With the introduction of its Knowledge Graph, the search giant is aiming for “smarter,” semantic search results which will intuit what a user really intends to search for. And in order to do so, Google is moving way beyond key words.

“Google is switching from simple keyword recognition to the identification of entities, nodes and relationships,” writes Mashable.

To accomplish this, the search engine is now drawing on a huge source of knowledge databases, from its own Google Maps and Google Books, to Wikipedia and even the World CIA Factbook.

“This update will have a greater initial impact than the updates that brought Google Images, videos, news and books, combined,” says Mashable. “It’s big and it’s probably going to be everywhere.”

This week in marketing studies and reports:

Report: Facebook and Twitter to double ad spend by 2016

According to a report from BIA/Kelsey, reported on by Mashable, by 2016, global ad spend on social media platforms will hit $9.8 billion, as compared to $3.8 billion in 2011.

The report also forecasts that ad spend on Twitter and Facebook will double by that time.

70 percent of app users don’t pay much for them

TechCrunch reported on a study this week from ABI that says roughly 70 percent of those who use mobile apps pay “either nothing or very little” for them or in them. The study chalks up the bulk of spending on or in apps to  ”big spending ‘whales.’”

Facebook’s most engaging brands

An infographic released this week by SocialBakers listed the top brands on social media, based on engagement. Those with the most fans on Facebook ranked in the following order: Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Converse, Red Bull, and Oreo.

The top five fastest moving global brands were Halls, Trident, L’Oréal, Chiclets, and Axe.

US app downloads up almost 30 percent

According to report from Nielsen, reported on by TechCrunch, the average number of app downloads by US consumers has increased by 28 percent, to 41, since last year. Four out of five of the most popular apps are Google owned.

Poll: 46 percent believe Facebook is a “passing fad”

Mashable reported on a poll conducted by Associated Press and CNBC that found that, while 43 percent of Americans believe Facebook “will likely be successful for the long haul,” the other 46 percent consider it to be a passing fad.

1. You recently highlighted the potential to connect OpenTable and Foursquare for a more complete experience. What do you think stops companies from looking for and taking full advantage of potential opportunities to improve their services?

I think that companies like OpenTable and Foursquare have so many opportunities for partnerships that it is sometimes difficult to choose which ones to go for. Foursquare has a great way of handling this by making their API available so developers can build an app similar to the one I described with OpenTable. The important thing to remember is that customers want an all-in-one experience. If they can check in to a place and are automatically rewarded without having to go to different apps for different reasons, it will be a better experience. Similarly, HubSpot’s all-in-one software gives you that same experience by putting everything a marketer needs in one place.

2. In the past you’ve talked about big brands making social media mistakes. What are some of the mistakes you see individuals making when they try to establish a social presence?

Establishing a personal brand online isn’t an easy task. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is trying to be someone they aren’t. If you don’t show a bit of your personality, it is harmful. For example, it is great to tweet out content and show your interests that way, but it is also important to once in awhile tweet about your other interests, even if it won’t engage others. Also, I think there are a lot of people who spend their full day tweeting and responding to every person they follow, and that is really overkill. It clogs up other people’s feeds and does not encourage as much interaction as you would think. Having that balance between personal and professional is important to establishing a respected social presence.

3. You recently published an ebook on event marketing. What are some of the lessons you learned from writing and publishing an ebook?

Writing and publishing an ebook was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. It took a lot of time, but not only did I get a chance to improve my writing skills, but I got the chance to work of my design skills. The great thing about writing ebooks and blog posts at HubSpot is that you learn so much about the topic when you are writing because there is a lot of research involved when putting something like this together. After the ebook was published, I also had the opportunity to talk to HubSpot customers about some of the event marketing they are doing and brainstorm with them about ideas they could put into practice.

But, here’s the problem:  some marketers aren’t measuring the right things; or, perhaps, they aren’t measuring things in the right way.

Marketers are so conditioned to track their traditional online environs that they often ignore other metrics. For example, most companies fail to adequately measure social media marketing and offline conversions—phone calls.

Social Media

• Over 90 percent of businesses use social media in some way (Source: Social Media Examiner, 2012)
• Only 16 percent of businesses using social media are actually measuring the ROI of their social media programs (Source: eMarketer, 2012)

Phone Calls

• 52 percent of all mobile advertising leads to a phone call (Source: xAd, 2012)
• 61 percent of mobile searches lead to a phone call (Source: Google, 2012)
• 60 percent of online interactions eventually lead to a phone call (Source: Web Analytics World, 2011)

Many marketers are failing to measure things that are important. And it is clear—especially given the explosion of mobile marketing—that phone calls are critical to an overall marketing strategy. But, as noted above, most businesses do not track phone calls, track phone leads, gather phone marketing data or integrate call tracking into overall conversion rates.

In short: very few companies have a complete picture of their multi-channel marketing analytics.

By failing to track their calls, marketers are missing information on an entire segment of their inbound marketing. Thus, they are missing out on the marketing automation, the marketing metrics and revenue from an entire segment of potential customers.

Start tracking vital metrics. Start tracking phone calls and social media. My next few posts will address how to track these things more effectively.

If your site isn’t optimized correctly, important content will be completely ignored or under ranked. Consequently, the benefit of any link acquisition activities you’re undertaking will be seriously diminished.

These five SEO blunders are not only big, they’re popular. How many of them is your website guilty of?

1. Bungling Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML elements that convey information to Google about a web page’s content and importance – and there are scores of ways to go wrong when setting them up. These are common Meta tag errors that reduce a page’s ability to rank well.

• Title tags neither keyword-optimized nor relevant. Title tags are the most important Meta element of a page, as they tell Google exactly what the page is about.
• Failure to do keyword research. Without it, it’s impossible to keyword-optimize title tags – and content.
• Duplicate tags. Certain types of Meta tags should be unique for each site page, such as Title tags and Description tags.
• Improper use of Robots tags. The family of Robots tags strongly influence site crawling and indexing.

In #5, I’ll provide a little guidance for dealing with these issues.

2. Having Duplicate Versions of URLs

For a variety of reasons, a site may have the same page of content displaying at different URLs. Frequently seen examples of this:

• http://www.company.com and http://company.com
• www.company.com and www.company.com/index.php
• www.company/miracle-widget and www.company/item-xxxxx

These situations force Google to decide which location (URL) of the content is the “real” page. Making matters worse, if inbound and internal links point to different versions of the URL – a very common occurrence – Google becomes even more confused about which page to rank and how highly to rank it.

Ideally, all duplicate versions of URLs should be eliminated. Sometimes, however, multiple URLs are unavoidable due to programming considerations. If multiples cannot be eliminated, all inbound and internal links should point to the preferred version of the URL. In addition, use rel=”canonical” attributes to tell Google which version of a duplicated page to pay attention to.

Here is an example of the Canonical tagging from Magid, a manufacturer and distributor of leather safety gloves.  The product page below has several versions, a non-preferred version being http://www.magidglove.com/Magid-DuraFit-Goatskin-Leather-Drivers-Gloves-with-Kevlar-Liner-1.aspx?DepartmentId=217.

Magid tells Google which version to index and rank by inserting the following rel=”canonical” code in the above-noted URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.magidglove.com/Magid-DuraFit-Goatskin-Leather-Drivers-Gloves-with-Kevlar-Liner-1.aspx” />

By inserting this code, Magid tells Google to pass any value this version of the page has to the primary page, which has the URL http://www.magidglove.com/Magid-DuraFit-Goatskin-Leather-Drivers-Gloves-with-Kevlar-Liner-1.aspx.

3. Poor Internal Linking Structure

When Google crawls your site, it looks at your internal linking structure, and concludes that the pages you link to most frequently are the most important. Popular blunders for internal linking include:

• Not having a coherent internal linking structure.
• Failing to set up rel=”no follow” links to highly linked but SEO-irrelevant pages such as contact and privacy policy pages. No follow tags tell Google not to credit these pages with any link value.
• Failing to use keywords in anchor text for internal links. Doing so adds value to the page being linked to.

Footer links are a good way to establish a solid internal linking structure. PacMoore, an industrial spray drying company, uses this footer globally on its site:

The anchor text includes important keywords and features pages of the site that are most important to Google.  Displaying these links site-wide reinforces the point that the linked-to pages are important and deserve high ranking.

4. Poorly Optimized Content

On-page text must be optimized in order for Google to match it up and rank it highly for relevant search queries. There are many ways to go wrong, but the good news is, the fixes are a matter of knowing what to write – and then writing it. Common ways sites stumble:

• Failing to include keywords in page headlines and subheads.
• Failing to add keywords to image alt attributes and titles.
• Failing to optimize video.
• Conveying essential information in Flash, which is basically invisible to Google, instead of text.
• Failing to write enough text, which tells Google the page is superficial and therefore not valuable.

5. Not Using Google Webmaster Tools

As we’re seeing, there are hundreds of tactical traps associated with each of these mistake areas. If you’re throwing your hands up in despair – don’t. Google Webmaster Tools is a free, online resource that will tell you exactly and in detail what your onsite SEO issues are.

In addition to identifying issues in the areas I’ve already discussed, Webmaster Tools reports common site problems such as unidentified error pages, unintentional black hat SEO tactics and pagination problems.

Reviewing your site in Webmaster Tools on a monthly basis is a good practice. If you haven’t done a review recently – or ever – you could be in for a bad SEO surprise.

Despite Google’s dominance in the search engine market, there does seem to be room for a major new competitor. comScore’s March 2012 report of search engine rankings reinforces the fact that, for some time, a usage gap has existed between Google (66.4 percent) and its closest rivals, Microsoft sites, including Bing (15.3 percent) and Yahoo! (13.7 percent).

Facebook could quickly rise to second place if it were to launch a search engine, according to at least one new study, which projects a Facebook search engine could grab as much as 22 percent market share.

Facebook is Working On Search

In late March, Bloomberg Businessweek speculated that Facebook was indeed up to something in search: “About two dozen Facebook engineers, led by a former Google engineer named Lars Rasmussen, are working on an improved search engine, say two people familiar with the project who did not want to be named because the company is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO.” Of course, it could just as easily be a project to improve Facebook’s own search capability which, as Chris Crum writes in WebProNews, “isn’t the greatest or most efficient tool for finding information. …the results are often unhelpful – even the filtered results.”

As Facebook’s growth continues to skyrocket, a poor search capability hampers its business model. Improved search is not only a nice-to-have after an IPO, it’s a potential game-changer. “Just think how much more useful Facebook would be if you could easily use it to find things,” writes Crum. “As a business, think about how much better Facebook could work for you if you could better optimize for its search feature, and it delivered your product or service’s page to people searching with relevant needs – or perhaps better yet, when their friends are talking about or checking in at your business.”

Search in the Context of Social

Still, if Facebook is improving its own search, does that automatically mean it is readying itself for a battle with Google? Interestingly, it may not have a choice. Google has already implemented “Search Plus Your World” this year, which takes Google Plus into consideration in delivering search results. Microsoft, meanwhile, obviously took notice – the company just announced its own makeover, positioning it this way in a blog post by the Bing team: “Over the coming weeks, we will be introducing a brand new way to search designed to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.” Sounds like a pretty good description of social search to me.

Bing already has a relationship with Facebook; in fact, Facebook uses Bing for its more general search results. That makes Bing’s move all the more intriguing. Aligning Bing’s social search capabilities with Facebook could pit the two against Google in a way that either may be unable to do alone. On the other hand, if Facebook truly wants to have a go at Google by itself, it could zing Bing.

A Market Too Big to Ignore

Lest we forget, Bloomberg Businessweek reminds us that the search advertising market is worth $15 billion, which “could be a huge opportunity for [Facebook]. It’s also a way to attack a chief rival, Google, which is moving in the opposite direction, from search to social, with its incipient Google+ network. … Facebook could also follow the lead of companies such as Google and Microsoft and start selling relevant—and profitable—keyword ads alongside results.”

One thing you can be sure of: Facebook won’t be shy about pursuing any business opportunity. As a public company, Facebook will put a whole new face on revenue, revenue, and more revenue. That could be reason enough for a Facebook search engine.

One wonders if they planned it together.

This week MasterCard and Visa both announced new digital wallet services, precursors to their planned mobile payments services, according to TechCrunch.

At a conference in New Orleans May 7, MasterCard unveiled its new PayPass Wallet Services, a product the company is touting as “the future of payments for consumers, merchants and partners.”

The service is broken up into three areas: PayPass Acceptance Network, which lets merchants accept digital payments across different networks, PayPass Wallet, a white label product for merchants and banks, and PayPass API, which lets partners use “MasterCard’s check-out, fraud detection and authentication services,” says Mashable.

MasterCard’s PayPass Wallet Services will be available first in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia as of the third quarter of 2012.

Visa’s new offering, V.me, is designed to make the process of shopping online easier, with fewer steps. Allowing consumers to store the information for their Visa, Discover, MasterCard, and American Express cards, V.me users only have to enter their account email and password – no shipping preferences required.

Though the service is just launching in Beta, Visa has plans of introducing mobile payments soon, as well as of “leveraging NFC, QR codes and ‘other technology,’ which would allow you to tap your phone to a secure reader at the point-of-sale in order to pay for your purchase, scan a QR code or perform some other type of interaction,” writes TechCrunch.

Facebook testing Highlighted Posts, planning paid apps

In a move Mashable described as moving “into Craigslist territory,” Facebook began experimenting this week Highlighted Posts, a feature that allows users to pay a few dollars to ensure more friends see a post.

The feature is designed for individual Facebook users, not organizations or brands. But, according to TechCrunch, only about 12 percent of your friends ever see any given post you make, and the new Highlight feature would come in handy for posts you really want to reach a big number of people, like advertising a garage sale, a gig you’re playing with your band, or announcing that you have a pet up for adoption.

But just because Highlighted Posts aren’t intended for big businesses doesn’t mean the feature doesn’t hold extra monetization potential for Facebook. As Mashable aptly noted, “If the program is successful, it could let Facebook enter the online classified market, a segment that the IAB pegged at $2.6 billion in 2011.”

But Highlighted Posts are just one of the new products Facebook is testing as its IPO, scheduled for next week, looms ever closer. May 9, the company also announced that it’s beginning a beta program that will let app developers charge a flat fee from Facebook users who want access to their products.

“Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps,” Facebook said in a post cited by TechCrunch. “This is a simple-to-implement payment feature that lets people pay a flat fee to use an app on Facebook.com.”

Those interested in Facebook’s beta paid apps program can sign up here.

Facebook at work on mobile

According to a May 12 release from Reuters, Mark Zuckerberg is saying that one of Facebook’s top priorities for 2012 will be to work on its mobile and advertising experience.

Reuters cited Zuckerberg as saying Facebook’s mobile app “is just getting started” at this week’s Palo Alto stop on the Facebook IPO roadshow.

As Mashable noted, regardless of how big the network has become, mobile monetization has been a recurring question since Facebook initially filed for its IPO.

“This has been a major problem for the social network, especially when it comes to competing in mobile-first areas such as location and photo sharing.”

Report: Google may acquire messaging app Meebo

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal‘s AllThingsD, Google may soon be acquiring California-based Meebo.

Though Meebo began in 2005 as a web-based messaging app, it has since developed other apps for social communication, for both publishers and consumers.

Meebo’s last round of financing raised $25 million for the company, reports Mashable,  and it has raised a total exceeding $60 million over its existence. AllThingsD is citing one source who says the deal could be worth up to $100 million

Etsy nabs $40 M for expansion

An online peer-to-peer marketplace for second-hand and home-made goods, Etsy believes in its ability to grow. And, apparently, so do investors. So much so that the company just announced that it has raised $40 million for a planned expansion.

The funding round was led by Index Ventures and also saw participation from participation by Burda, Union Square Ventures, Accel Partners.

As Mashable notes, it doesn’t seem to matter that the term “expansion” isn’t very clearly defined; Etsy simply said they’re looking to become “one-stop shop for creative independent businesses.”

Though the company did give some indication as to what they may be using the new funding for:

“We plan to grow Etsy into an economic force all around the world and we want to provide more products and services to help sellers succeed and build their businesses on the Etsy platform,” TechCrunch cited Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson as saying.

But since so much of Etsy’s strength is tied to how simple its platform is for sellers, and since it’s only logical that entrepreneurs outside the U.S. would adopt the site for the same reasons Americans have, improving services for sellers, and making those services available globally makes sense.

“There’s a huge opportunity for Etsy to grow the opportunities for sellers,” Dickerson told the New York Times.

Google updates Offers

As part of a larger announcement for updates to its Google Maps for Android, Google also announced that some changes are on the way for Google Offers, the company’s Groupon-like product.

Not only will Android users of Google Maps now be able to get free offers from the service, “like a free coffee or dessert,” reports TechCrunch, but U.S. merchants will now have access to a self-service interface to create offers like these on their own.

Though Google is certainly not a revolutionary in terms of the daily deals space, TechCrunch outlines some of the ways in which Google’s new updates  make it different from many of its competitors:

“Until now, Google and most of its competitors in this market have focused on pre-paid offers. With this new free offering [...] Store owners can use a new self-service interface to set specific times for when and how long an offer should be valid [and] gives merchants access to stock photography and other tools to fine-tune their messages. The coupons can be for money off, a percentage discount or a free product or gift.”

Bing breaks up search results, now more social

Microsoft’s search engine Bing has undergone a complete makeover, Mashable reported May 10. It’s Bing’s biggest redesign yet, and one that prizes social results without letting them get too deep in the mix.

Because the new Bing separates three different types of results – algorithmic, contextual, and social – into three clearly defined panes, it’s able to show users results that may be relevant for different reasons and still allow them to easily choose which type of results suits them best.

For example, searching for a nearby restaurant, you may want an algorithmic result (you’re looking for the restaurant’s web page and menu), or a contextual one (you want a map or review.) You may even be looking for social results (a comment or check-in from a friend who ate there.)

Bing isn’t the first search engine to work content from social networks into their results, but they seem to be taking on Google by showing it’s possible to do so with a fair, unbiased approach.

As TechCrunch wrote, “Bing aims to frame Google as impure, with its desire to highlight Google+ distorting the quality of search result ranking. If it works it could claw market share away from Google and make search a real two-horse race.”

The update will be introduced across the U.S. in the next few weeks, followed by international implementation.

This week in marketing studies and reports:

More time spent on Facebook mobile than on its site

According to report from comScore, Americans on average spend more time every month on Facebook’s mobile site (441 minutes) than they do on its regular website (391 minutes.)

But, as TechCrunch noted, “that’s actually a big problem fro Facebook [as] Facebook usually shows four to seven ads per page on its website, but only a few ads per day in its mobile news feed.”

Though Facebook announced this week during its IPO roadshow that one of their primary goals for 2012 would be to improve mobile.

Bing gets 30 percent of search market

A report from Experian Hitwise found that, though Google still has the largest search market share, Bing’s is growing and that the search engine accounted for 30.01 percent of all search queries as of April. That’s a 5 percent increase for that period, and 6 percent increase month-over-month.

For their part, Google searches had decreased by 3 percent form the previous month, and 11 percent from the previous year.

The top retailers on social media

An infographic released this week by social analytics firm Campalyst, and reported on by Econsultancy, followed the Internet’s top 250 retailers and what social networks they’re on.

Of the top 250, 97 percent are present on Facebook, 96 percent are on Twitter, 90 percent are on YouTube, 67 percent are on Google+, and 61 percent are on Pinterest.

The report also analyzed which industries were most followed, depending on the social network. For Facebook, mass merchants did best, while apparel and accessories reigned on Twitter, computers and electronics were more popular on YouTube and Google+, and Hardware and Home improvement were most popular on Pinterest.

69 percent of tablet owners buy something on it every month

Econsultancy reported on a new study from InMobi and Mobtext that found that, not only do 69 percent of tablet owners use the device to make purchases, 20 percent say they “shop less in bricks and mortar stores since purchasing their device.”

Which countries are most ready to adopt mobile payments?

MasterCard released a study May 7 ranking the 34 countries they deem most ready to adopt mobile payments. Topping the list in were Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Kenya and South Korea.

Pinterest assists more sales than Facebook

According to a study from Boticca picked up by Econsultancy, Facebook may still be more popular by far than Pinterest, but the latter actually drives more sales and new customers.

The study found that “Pinterest has become its number one social referrer, assisting roughly 10% of sales, compared to 7% from Facebook,” writes Econsultancy.

On top of that, Boticca found that, of the users referred by Pinterest, 86 percent were new to their site, while the figure for Facebook was 57 percent.

Pinterest users also spend more – an average of $180, as compared to the Facebook-referred average of $85.

About half of U.S. consumers use smartphones, about half of those are Android

A study released May 7 by Nielsen and cited by TechCrunch found that, as of March, 50.4 percent of U.S. consumers owned a smartphone. Of that number, 48.5 percent owned an Android powered handset.

1. During LogMyCalls’ Beta period, what system features became customer favorites and did any of them surprise you with how popular they became over other features? 

The surprise has been the number of people interested in our lead scoring and call scoring functionality. LogMyCalls can actually score the quality of leads and track close rates from calls. It has, frankly, surprised me that so many companies are interested in this data.

We knew people would be very interested in call tracking reports that show marketing data. We knew they would be interested in our Google Analytics and CRM integration. We also knew they would be interested in some of our mobile marketing automation features. But honestly, we didn’t anticipate that many customers would want to use our call scoring and lead scoring features.

Basically, they like that LogMyCalls allows them to create and customize scorecards to grade leads and marketing channels. LogMyCalls also keeps track of phone close rates and conversion rates. And we’re finding that businesses—Enterprise-level, SMB, marketing firms, affiliate marketers—are interested in tracking phone close rates, phone lead quality and phone conversion rates. This data was being ignored by marketers, which is weird, because close rates on the phone are significantly higher than online close rates, and phone calls are becoming more frequent with the deluge of mobile marketing. 

Our message is simple: your marketing data is incomplete if you’re not tracking calls and call conversions in the same way you measure web traffic and web conversions.

2. Additional customer and sales data can be great resources for business, but knowing what to do with the data can be challenging. What are some of the best and/or creative ways you’ve heard of clients using their LogMyCalls data?

We work with SEO, SEM and direct response marketing firms that are using LogMyCalls for basic call tracking but, also to track phone close rates. So when a client calls them and says, ‘Hey, your marketing efforts are not working for us’, they’re able to say, ‘Yes it is, we generated 143 calls for you last week. The problem is that you only closed 2% of those calls.’ LogMyCalls allows marketing firms to get more business and retain that business.

One of our clients had been pouring money into an advertising channel they assumed was working (they were spending around 70% of their advertising budget on this specific channel), but once they started using LogMyCalls they realized this advertising channel was producing ZERO phone calls. In fact, it produced ZERO calls for 3 months.

We had another client contact us just this week that said they were able to recover a very large deal after being alerted by LogMyCalls. An employee had failed to close the deal, so the supervisor heard the call in LogMyCalls, called the customer back and closed the deal himself.

3. Some services start out really strong, and then they start to suffer from “feature creep.” How do you and your team plan to keep LogMyCalls feature rich, but not bloated?

It is all about focus.

We’ve got to remain focused on our core goal which is to mine the data out of every single call. Within every call there are truckloads of critical marketing data, customer intelligence and call analytics. LogMyCalls’ future features will remain focused on that singular mission: turning dialogue from phone calls into useful marketing, customer intelligence and sales data.

The other thing I want to point out here is that we’ve got some great partners. Some of our largest clients are going to be instrumental in the new features we release. We are working with them to map-out and develop new features. Our largest clients and partners are very demanding, which is good, because it continually pushes us to develop new features, while still focusing on our core mission.

FYI, we have a few feature releases planned for early fall and then a major feature release planned in the winter.

4. What else should we know about LogMyCalls?

Well, the sign-up process is super-simple. You can sign up online, request a demo or just call us at (866) 811-8880. We can have everything set up immediately if you need it. Also, LogMyCalls is very inexpensive and simple to use.

We also provide a constant stream of marketing tips and information on our Twitter account and Google+ page.  So make sure you follow us and add us to your circles.

When it comes to digital media buying, U.S. ad agencies certainly seem to favor social media. According to a new survey of U.S. ad agencies, conducted by media software firm STRATA, a Comcast company, media buyers rank social media second only to online advertising and ahead of search. The survey, which polls both small and large agencies around the country and therefore is representative of a broad sample, indicated that social media is considered the “focus” of digital spending by 69 percent of advertising executives, a 32 percent increase over last year. Mobile advertising also showed strong growth in the survey.

Keep in mind that ad agency executives are keenly aware of media trends, and they know all about the explosive growth of the online world as an ad medium. As I recently reported, ad agencies and their clients are discovering that online videos have a potency that at times can rival television advertising. Television is no longer the no-brainer choice for launching big ad campaigns; digital media is being taken seriously as a viable alternative.

So it only makes sense that the ad agencies would now be flocking to social media, given its current popularity with so many consumers. Agencies, after all, recommend media buys on the basis of consumer reach.

Questions Still Linger

Despite the breathless embrace of social media by the ad world, questions still linger regarding the advertising efficiency of social media. I’ve commented in the past about the difficulty of objectively quantifying results in terms of being able to attribute sales to social media ads.

It turns out this concern is shared by big advertisers as well. In a recent Wall Street Journal article unkindly titled, “The Big Doubt Over Facebook,” Michael Sprague, Vice President of Marketing at Kia’s North America Division says, “The question with Facebook and many of the social media sites is, ‘What are we getting for our dollars?’” Although Kia advertises on Facebook, Sprague wonders “does that ultimately lead to a new vehicle sale?”

Agency executives underscore their clients concerns. According to the Journal, Martin Sorrell, head of the world’s leading ad holding company, WPP, said at a conference in March that “clients, for the very first time are starting to question the measurement issue” when it comes to social media advertising. Sorrell said “clients have gone almost willy-nilly” into social media “because it’s fashionable to do so,” but now they “are increasingly starting to look at the value of those investments.”

Facebook on the Defensive

As the big gorilla in the social media space, Facebook has the most to gain and, potentially, the most to lose. While Facebook has been aggressively pushing its ad business, some of its deficiencies in that area have come to light. For one thing, Facebook doesn’t make measurement entirely transparent because, according to the Journal article, “While advertisers can directly track the return from ads on Google and Yahoo, Facebook mostly doesn’t permit third-party surveys on its site or allow ads to be tagged with ‘cookies’…” What’s more, Facebook “has alienated some advertisers with what they perceive as a highhanded attitude that implies that marketers have nowhere else to turn. Some media buyers and advertisers said Facebook has stymied their attempts to get more ad measurement, for instance.”

To blunt criticism, Facebook has collaborated with comScore and Nielsen in an effort to improve the ability of advertisers to track results. That is helpful, but if grumbling from the ad community doesn’t abate, Facebook’s viability as an advertising medium will come under fire just as the company launches its IPO.

In fairness to Facebook and social media in general, marketers need to recognize that there will always be inherent challenges in measuring its ad effectiveness. Social media is simply different from other forms of media. As Sarah Hofstetter, president of 360i, a digital ad agency, told The Wall Street Journal, “If a marketer measures [return on investment] as direct sales from the Web, then Facebook may not be the ideal platform. But if the goal is to move the needle on brand health metrics, whether it’s awareness or engagement… then Facebook should be a key part of the marketing mix for most consumer brands.”

Cost Plus makes an attractive proposition for a company interested in expanding its online presence:

Cost Plus is making plans to generate annual web sales of about $100 million by 2017. “We have the ability to increase our e-commerce business to $100-plus million during the next three to five years,” Feld told Wall Street analysts on the company’s recent year-end earnings call. “Our e-commerce model is profitable.”

For the year ended Jan. 28, Cost Plus reported:

• An increase in e-commerce revenue of about 53.8% to $26 million from $16.9 million in 2010.
• Total sales of $963.8 million, up about 5.2% from total sales of $916.6 million.
• Net income increased year over year about 469% to $16.5 million from $2.9 million in 2010.
• The retailer didn’t disclose a figure for comparable-store sales.

The web accounted for 2.7% of total sales, compared with 1.8% in 2010.

This move also comes on the heels of previous collaboration between the two companies:

“Our successful merchandising and product collaborations over the last two years have demonstrated that our organizations work well together and that we can make key contributions to the continued success of the combined company,” says Cost Plus CEO Barry Feld.

With the acquisition it will be interesting to see whether Cost Plus will continue as a brand or be absorbed by BBB. Since both companies currently have live affiliate programs the latter move would have consequences for their channel partners.