Web 2.0 beats traditional advertising methods...and Google Trends proves it!

I spent some time on Google Trends today as I was thinking about web 2.0 tools for marketing compared to traditional marketing methods. You may recall I consider traditional promotion strategies the big fish of marketing (and I advocate going after the far more numerous small and medium size fish.) In my first test I compared direct mail, tv ads, billboards, and radio advertising.

One note about Google Trends before we proceed...this is just showing the relative quantity of Google searches on the given search terms. It may be easy to dismiss this but as Steve Rubel said in this post, "search engines show us what's on everyone's mind," and it's therefore interesting to note the trends of the collective thinking.

Here's what the trends show over the last four years in these traditional marketing areas:

What you see here is that all but billboards are down from four years ago. Direct mail seemed to fall slowly and then hold fairly even in 2007. TV ads appear to have the most dramatic swings. Incidentally, notice the spike in TV ads early each year. Those are Super Bowl commercial searches for sure. Radio was down a little but steady for the last four years, though clearly below the other three areas.

After I looked at these four areas I included the term "web 2.0" to see if that mere term competed with these traditional mediums. Here's what I found:

Web 2.0 really didn't take off until late 2005. By early 2006 you see that it eclipses the four traditional terms and then clears them significantly through 2006 and 2007.

Just for fun I tried one more trend comparison by throwing "blogs" into the mix. I dropped radio ads from the comparison since it was at the bottom of the pile and here's what I found:

With "blogs" included it makes everything else just look silly. I was actually surprised it was such a huge difference. More surprising to me was that it was higher even back in 2004. We know that there were less than six million blogs at most in 2004 so it's a bit curious to me, but quite interesting.

So what can we derive from all of this? At the very least we know there are far more searches for "web 2.0" and "blogs" than than any of the traditional marketing methods. Even if all those searches weren't marketing related (and we know that's the case), the phrase web 2.0 is a business, marketing, and technology term. We can discern that the collective marketing and business interests are greatly interested in web 2.0 from these trends and if that's where they are, it's reasonable to look more seriously at them if you still have doubts.

One final one for kicks if you're interested. Who do you think wins in a match up of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Google, and blogs? See it here.

One Thing Bloggers Will Love About Your Website

I hadn't been blogging for too many months when I realized most websites weren't built with the notion that there may be a way to help a blogger out. That realization birthed the "three ways to get bloggers to hate your website" post. Ever since then I have sought to make sure websites I am a part of are blog friendly. Early last year I co-created MySliceofPi.com and we dedicated an entire resource page to bloggers (and any other media who might be interested.) The intention of the page was to cater to the image needs bloggers might have if they chose to write a post about the site. Since then, I have recommended similar pages to clients and over the summer one client, Modern Parables, took me up on it. They created a blogger/media page with multiple options for their logo, images from the product, images from their original films, embeddable video links, and movie stills.

They went all out and it's been helpful to the numerous bloggers who have written about their resource. In fact, today they received a note specifically about the blogger/media page:

"I am SO impressed. I just went to your web site and downloaded and saved the images in less than a minute. That has to be the easiest time I've ever had finding and saving images. Woo hoo!!!!!"

Getting a page like this up on your organization's site isn't difficult. You just have to take a little time to do it. Bloggers (and other media) will love you for it. When's the last time your site got a woo hoo?

Episode 2 of The New Mediology Now Online

Check out the latest episode of The New Mediology. This week Nathan and I discussed our top 5 web applications and what we love about them. As always, we welcome feedback.

Will this be the year of mobile everything?

I've been chewing on something for quite a while and it's starting to come together a bit. I know mobile devices and mobile web access are a huge opportunity with steady growth for new media. The thing I haven't been able to really put a finger on was just how it's all going to converge. Today I got a bit more clarity...kind of like when you see one of those Magic Eye posters for the first time and it finally comes into focus. Paull Young's post (via a tweet from Lee Hopkins) helped it come into focus.

Questions or Comments for The New Mediology Podcast

Tomorrow night Nathan and I will be recording the next episode of The New Mediology podcast. If you haven't heard the first episode I would encourage you to listen now or subscribe in iTunes. If you have questions or comments that you would like us to consider including in the next episode leave a comment on either this blog, the podcast blog, or email me.

Video of the Week: Wheelbarrow skills

Ah, the school relay races. Seems like some people always took those a lot more seriously than others. These guys were definitely serious, but you gotta admit, it's a pretty sweet flip move. If there was a professional league of wheelbarrow racers they would be in.



Link for the feed readers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvASnyOy5B4

Two Types of Blog Posts: The Meal and The Snack

If you have blogged for any time at all you have inevitable wondered about blogging frequency. You've probably asked questions like: Am I blogging enough? Am I blogging too much? How many blog posts should I write each week?

I've heard blogging referred to as "feeding the beast" and that once you start you must keep on feeding it. I agree generally with that idea and encourage bloggers to post a minimum of once a week. In my view that's the bare minimum to show that you're regularly active. This is not to say that if you post once every other week your blog is without value, but you can probably expect that people will learn your posting cycle and will check you blog about as frequently as you post. So don't be surprised if your traffic is sparse and you only post twice a month.

On the other end of the spectrum are blogs that post 20-30 times a day. The average person probably won't hit anywhere near that. Conventional wisdom (if there is such a thing for blogs) has said for the last few years that the more you post, the better off you are. That's true to a degree if you consider that every blog post is another hook in the water for people to find you through Google searches. It also shows that your blog is very active, which is a great thing for readers to realize.

The downside to these massive posting blogs, however, is that they create pressure on new bloggers to feel like they're failures if they don't blog often enough. Also, that type of blog can overwhelm readers because if they miss two days of posts they'll have 50 posts to sort through just to catch up. They'll skim the headlines at best in that situation or may bail on the blog altogether out of a sense that the time commitment required to read the blog is more than they're willing to give.

I look at blog posts in two ways: some are meals and some are snacks. A meal is a well thought out post that has some meat to it. It doesn't necessarily have to be long though it very well may. A meal is a post where someone comes away feeling like the time invested in reading the post was well worth it. A snack, on the other hand, is a quick thought, idea, funny video, link, etc. to provide ongoing value to the blog's readers yet without the time commitment as a meal. Whereas a meal blog post may take a minute or two (or more) to read, a snack may only take 10 seconds.

I personally try to make sure I serve up one meal a week and at least two snacks. Some bloggers seem to have their own working combination of the two. Seth Godin, for instance, serves several meals a week with a few snacks in between. Lifehacker, on the other hand, is virtually all snacks while bloggers like Mitch Joel and Jeremiah Owyang seem to serve up a meal with about every post. Each blogger needs to find the right meal to snack ratio for his blog but I've found that with this understanding of two types of blog posts, new bloggers especially feel empowered to begin blogging without any unnecessary pressure. For me it's a mental gauge for the type of posts I'm going to write over the course of an average week.