Right on the heels of this Stanford study on iPhone addiction, Retreveo published these usage stats about social media usage and “addiction”.

Twitter and FaceBook:

• 48% of people check/update FaceBook and/or Twitter after they go to bed
• 18% of people under 25 years old can’t go more than a couple hours without checking in on FaceBook
• 61% of people under 25 have to check in on FaceBook at least once a day
• 11% of people over 25 years old can’t go more than a couple hours without checking in on FaceBook
• 55% of people over 25 have to check in on FaceBook at least once a day
• 16% of people under 25 years old rely on Twitter and/or FaceBook for the morning “news”

iPhone Users:

• 28% of iPhone users check/update Twitter before they get out of bed
• 26% of iPhone users check/update Twitter before they turn on their TV
• 23% of iPhone users rely on Twitter for their morning news

Electronic Messages:

• 11% of people under 25 years old can be interrupted by an electronic message during sex (The number drops to 6% of people over 25 years old)
• 24% of people under 25 can be interrupted by an electronic message while in the bathroom. (This number drops to 12% of people over age 25)
• 49% of people under 25 years old can be interrupted by an electronic message during a meal. (27% for people over 25 years of age)
• 22% of people under 25 years old can be interrupted by an electronic message during a meeting. (11% of people over 25 years of age)

I really think we might need to help the 11% and 24% in the last group.

Related Articles

• Our Social Media Obsession by the Numbers [STATS] (mashable.com)
• Facts : Addicted To Social Media (sociableblog.com)
• Addicted to Social Media? (stealthmode.com)
• We’re Addicted to Social Networks: 48% of Us Check Them in Bed (pamorama.net)
• We’re Addicted to Social Networks (socialmediatoday.com)
• Commented on “Patrick Curl: Social Media Consultant” (theresabloginmysoup.com)
• We’re addicted to social media, even in bed (sfgate.com)
• We’re addicted to social media, even in bed (seattlepi.com)
• Story of a Social Media Addict (danalookadoo.com)

Technorati Tags: Addiction, Facebook, iPhone, Social Media, Twitter

I work for a start-up and like the folks at virtually every start-up we dream of being covered by one of the Big 8  business publications: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, the Financial Times, and USA Today.

The folks at ITDatabase took a closer look at how they cover the tech industry and surveyed a group of veterans from major tech PR agencies to see what their experiences were like. The resulting report yielded a few interesting tidbits:

• The New York Times’ David Pogue (@Pogue) and Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) top the most followed tech journalists on Twitter while NY Times’ Motoko Rich and Bit blogger Jenna Wortham get retweeted much more often (500 and 331 times per post on average respectively).
• According to the tech PR veterans surveyed, 46.4% thought that that business press tech coverage is worse than it was five years ago. Only 25% thought it was better.
• Business success is not an indicator of press coverage see how Twitter and Facebook rule the total number of clippings along with Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Intriguing research if you are interested in tech PR.

One of my biggest complaints about Google Docs Spreadsheets is that their is no formatting menu to add hyperlinks to text in a cell. You actually have to use the following notation to make it happen:

=hyperlink(”URL”,”Hyperlinked  Text”)

Beyond that to indicate a cell is hyperlinked you need to format it yourself or the cell will simply appear as having text in the box with no link. Mousing over gives you a little indicator that the cell is a link but you probably would want to format the text with a blue color and underline so you know that it’s a link. My other pet peeve is that the context sensitive help doesn’t indicate that you need the quotes around your pair so entering the example:

=hyperlink(www.socializedSoftware.com, Socialized Software)

This would yield an #ERROR!. See the example below for some of the things I am talking about.

Okay I am done griping it has just been a very big inconvenience for me today.  I hope this helps someone.

I have sat in on these type of marketing meetings, have you?

via  Copyblogger on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Humor, marketing

At the Community Leadership Summit in San Jose a couple of weeks  ago I met  Jure Chualev. He’s the community manager for Zemanta who makes a handy authoring plugin for content creators. Zemanta provides a Firefox extension and plugins to popular blogging platforms to allow you to find related content.For example you can find a picture of a cow (or most anything) licensed under a permissive license like the Creative Commons to include in a blog post or find related links into a blog post.

I installed the Zemanta plugin for WordPress which gave me an interface for finding images or related articles. The interface makes it easy to add these images by dragging and dropping them into your WordPress editor, very similar to the Photo Dropper for WordPress.  In addition you can create a list of related articles (See the list I generated below) by selecting them from a list of articles ordered by their publish date.

You can also include a “Reblog” badge in your posts to encourage people to quote and link to your content. Beyond that you can also by syndicate your content through their Triond, a service that publishes your content through a relevant network and share revenue generated by that content. Overall Zemanta is a pretty cool tool to help improve the content and quality of your blog and to find relevant content.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta – the Coolest Application for Bloggers I Have Seen (change-management-blog.com)
• testing zemanta (glemak.com)
• Cool Firefox Add-in (polynesianmedic.com)
• Zemanta makes blogging while drinking easier (freakthenet.wordpress.com)
• Make Your Blog Posts Better (lockergnome.com)

Technorati Tags: Add-on, Blog, Firefox, Plug-in, WordPress, Zemanta

Some really good posts and information for Social Media and WordPress integration

• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite | Dan Zarrella – Nice plug-in for integrating Twitter and WordPress.
• SocioFluid – another social bookmarking plugin for wordpress | ImproveSeo.info – A good looking plugin for WordPress to display the social bookmarking buttons for digg, reddit, … I like the buttons because they are not too small and not too big.
• 10 Tools for the Social Media Marketer | Traffikd – If you are an avid user of social media and you are working to build traffic for your own website or blog with SMM, here are 10 tools to help make your work easier.
• SociBook Plugin For WordPress – Nice WordPress plugin to share your posts on a ton of social bookmarking sites.
• 5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly – The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results requires that website owners and content publishers make their websites both search and social media friendly.( via Jeff Cohen @dgtlpapercuts on Twitter)
• Is Everything You Know About SEO Wrong? » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – “Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.”
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online | Lateral Action – Breaks down the steps from acquiring web visitors to engaging them. Really awesome graph.

Technorati Tags: Content, Online, Online Content, SEO, SocBook, Social Media, SocioFluid, TweetSuite, WordPress

I thought this was an interesting description of what analysts do and how they like to be treated from Red Monk’s Michael Coté.

| View | Upload your own

Technorati Tags: analysts, AR

This week Andy Beal announced the winners of the 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship I was honored to be one of five finalists out of 31 entries. I didn’t win but congratulations are in order for Linda Bustos whose article 8 Stupid Things Webmasters do to Mess Up their Analytics is excellent.

I was surprised that I did come in first in total traffic since there where so many SEO/SEM professionals in the competition I thought I would be much lower in the rankings. It still got me a seat at the table and a single vote for my article which even in my own opinion was infererior to Linda’s I have added her Get Elastic ecommerce blog to my RSS reader it seems like she and her mates are very sharp.

Just for a record here’s a listing of the winners and their scoring:

Maybe next year I’ll have a shot but for now I’ll take a top five finish.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Contest, Marketing Pilgrim, SEM, SEO

Updates to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) becomes effective today.

They four main provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act for commercial emailers are:

1. Bans false or misleading header information
2. Prohibits Deceptive Subject Lines
3. Requires an opt-out method
4. Requires Commercial Email to be Identified as an Advertisement an must include the senders valid postal address.

For other resources on SPAM from the FTC you can visit their SPAM resource center. MarketingSherpa has good article on CAN-SPAM compliance as well.

photo credit: KhE 龙

Technorati Tags: CAN-SPAM, Compliance, Email Marketing, SPAM

I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO