You know, Cyber Monday is not considered the biggest online holiday traffic day.   Online retailers do better the 10 days or so before Christmas which is when people are rushing.  There doesn’t seem to be an official name for it yet! 

Tops for October from Nielsen – social networking sites:  myspace, facebook, classmates online, windows life spaces, aol hometown, linkedin, aol people connection, reunion.com, club penguin, buzznet.com.  Top 10 blogs:  blogger, wordpress, six apart typepad, tmz.com, livejournal, xanga, thatsfit, gizmodo, autoblog, styledash

Article on HarperCollins Author Assistant from BookSquare.  This is an example of one of the sites.  Our own Joe Wikert’s blog is mentioned in this article!

ACCOUNTS

Office supply stores report weak quarters.

TV networks in stores like Wal-Mart and Target are targeted to generate over 300 million this year.  The latest entrant is Borders TV which will hit 250 stores by February.    This is the NY Times article on Borders TV.

ADVERTISING 

Yahoo’s new ad venue – PTA newsletters, youth sport leagues, part of a venture with Adobe.  Publishers interested in signing on to this program can go here.

WSJ Office Network (place based video network) shows extremly strong recall retention with advertising that people found relevent to them.  The WSJ Office Network currently has video installation in top 15 DMAs.

Ever considered advertising on napkins?  NapAds reaches wide swath of popular nightlife venues.

What about advertising with tatoos? 

In a deal announced this week between Clear Channel and Bluetooth content distribution provider Qwikker, thousands of out-of-home ad properties will be able to talk to your phone directly and download robust content.  Passersby will be able to activate their Bluetooth receiver on a phone and accept an invitation from the signage to interact. 

An interesting text campaign for Project Runway that did extremely well.

BLOGS

The blogger’s guide to search engine optimization.  Includes some great examples of how to increase traffic.

CATEGORIESCooking – Gourmet, specialty sales expected to soar.   Another article – Fresh, super & organic top trends for 2008.Finance – AOL revamps money & finance site.  offering more up-to-theminute news & stock market information.

HOT STUFF

 Lots of Kindle stuff (outside of publishing sites) including how they’re marketing kindle (author testimonials, etc.)       Clickz    Forbes     Marketing Daily     MediaWeek

More publishers join video vendor Turnhere’s network including Bantam Dell, Chronicle, Disney (Hyperion), Doubleday Broadway, Hachette Book Group, Loyola Press, MacMillan, Thomas Nelson and W.W. Norton.

As we develop online learning centers of our own, here’s an interesting article on a  a newly integrated learning and community platform from Powered.   There is also a good link to Travelex who is using this system (as well as companies like AOL).

Video – Site Uploading.  This great information was flagged for us by our UK counterparts.  This is a great site called tubemogul.  This site allows you to do your distribution and analytics all in one place.  It has a universal upload tool and technology.  Included are youtube, metacafe, myspace, yahoo, aol, daily motion, brightcove, and you can do others as well.    Link

 ACCOUNTS

Staples promotes high-ticket items for the holidays.

ADVERTISING

AOL launches ticker ads (below the frame banners)

BLOGS

 Interesting article on haiku blogging.  It’s the format that Rosie O’Donnell often uses in her blog.  Way to get out messages that are short, but to the point and spend less time on blogging.

Top 1000 blogs launched

11 Tips for getting your comments noticed on a popular blog. 

 CATEGORIES

Pets:     Pampering pet owners make retailers happy. 

CREATIVE

Interview with Michael Carabetta, creative director at Chronicle Books.

 Search engine friendly copywriting style often not friendly to humans.

Eye-tracking rules.  Where you should put in a promotion, website, etc. to maximize your impact.  Example – Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation.  This is the full article.  This is a really good point-of reference when reviewing ads, websites and many other promotions.

MEDIA 

San Jose Mercury News reinvents itself.

Time Inc. bolsters digital brands.

MOBILE

Getting your content from the web to mobile phones using Bongo -With the Bango Button, consumers visiting websites, blogs or other destinations on their PCs can click on the button, which will take them to a page with instructions on how to find Bango’s Wap.com on their cellphones. Their content shows up there, ready for download.

RESEARCH

Social sites and blogs support growth of word-of-mouth marketing.

 STATS

Newspaper unique visitors and time spent per month – there is some interesting information here that may help to answer some questions we get about how much time and unique visitors to newspaper sites are meant when we give online visitor information with our PR and advertising information.  We are working on pulling together as much detailed information as we can get here on the top newspapers.  This kind of information (time spent per month, readership by articles) is not available at all for the print.  So, in general, knowing specifically who is reading the article about your book or product (whether in print or online) is not a quantifiable science. 

TWITTER

Guide to twitter as a tool for marketing and PR.  Great way  sharie links to timely resources or things found on the web that you’d like to share/promote immediately as well as tidbits of personal/business information.  Also, has some great other links.

Twitter limits UK tweets that users can receive by SMS to 250.

Seth Godin deemed this list of “eye tracking rules” worthy of posting on his blog, so here it is (and please note the caveat about some of the rules being made to be broken):

Eye Tracking Rules
(some of which are made to be broken).

Tim points us to a terrific summary of lessons learned from eye tracking studies.

The highlights, in alphabetical order:

* Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation.
* Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often.
* Bigger images get more attention.
* Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation.
* Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored.
* Formatting can draw attention.
* Headings draw the eye.
* Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page.
* Large blocks of text are avoided.
* Lists hold reader attention longer.
* Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.
* One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats.
* People generally scan lower portions of the page.
* Readers ignore banners.
* Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones.
* Show numbers as numerals.
* Text ads were viewed mostly intently of all types tested.
* Text attracts attention before graphics.
* Type size influences viewing behavior.
* Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.
* Users only look at a sub headline if it interests them.
* Users spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus.
* White space is good.

For a really detailed explanation of how eye tracking works and how it’s used to gauge user behavior/experience, read this. For a less detailed explanation, Wikipedia.

Here’s a link to the shelf-awareness presentation -

http://usportal.wiley.com/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&cached=true&parentname=CommunityPage&parentid=1&in_hi_userid=70149&control=SetCommunity&CommunityID=209&PageID=225

This from the BlogHer site – I’m very jealous and would attend if I was local. Any blogger or want to be blogger can attend.

What holiday calendar would be complete without a little BlogHer revelry? Certainly not ours…and we’d love for you to join us!

Who: All Bay Area BlogHers
When: Thursday, December 13th
Time: 5:30 to 8 p.m.
Where: Cafe Royale, 800 Post St. @ Leavenworth in San Francisco

Our holiday event is a great opportunity for you to meet, mingle & jingle with the ever-growing BlogHer community. Members and non-members are welcome, as are friends, family, and colleagues.

The event will take place at Cafe Royale, the cozy cafe in downtown SF where we held last year’s meetup. Once again we’ll be offering complimentary hors d’oeuvres along with a fine selection of wines, beers, and Soju cocktails (no-host bar).

So join the party, and eat, drink, and be merry!

*Due to the venue’s capacity limits, we do need you to RSVP if you intend to join us. Please RSVP in comments below, or send an email to let us know to expect you!

Posted by Elle at 8:01 AM 0 comments

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook’s “Business Solutions” and creating pages for key brands and books within my stable. The first pages created were for Wrox, IT Girl’s Guides and For Dummies. The first question I got was from Colleen, who wanted to know why I was duplicating efforts, because we already have a Wrox page. No, I replied, we have a Wrox group, and dammifino how they are different.

Ideally, every brand that we have in our groups that is Facebook appropriate could have a page. But how do they differ from groups? I’ve seen a couple of good ways the groups can be used for press release announcemcents, but it’s hard to keep up robust discussions on there. Has anyone used these and can you offer any words of advice to moi?

PS – if you haven’t friended me (Ellen Gerstein) on facebook yet, what are you waiting for???

Posted by Elle at 8:04 AM 0 comments

The big blond one has repeatedly said that we need to be in “continuous improvement” mode. That is to say out and about, attending seminars, conferences, and training sessions to always be on top of new technologies, and getting new ideas. There are a couple of events that marketers from the tech group will be participating in that I wanted to share:

BlogHer 08 – They don’t have the full 2008 event plans up yet, but there’s a BlogHer business in NY in April, and the main BlogHer pow wow in San Francisco in July. We’ll be sponsoring both conferences, and as such, I would love to get more people throughout the company participating. There are bookstores at both shows, so we can sell books and have author signings. There are panels that our authors and even we can be a part of. There are super technical sessions and great networking opportunities. Please contact me in the comments section if you are interested in participating in any way, shape or form. Note, despite the BlogHer, men are welcomed and encouraged to attend.

SXSW Interactive – Sandy Smith and I are planning on attending. It looks to be a good networking and educational conference. Plus, it’s in Austin, so, hello, BBQ and tex-mex!

Other events pop up all the time. Every day, I get an invitation to a seminar or webinar about social networking. Not sure even 3/4 of them are worthwhile, at least to me, but they might be for others. AdWeek and the Advertising Club of NY has a bunch of lists that you can sign up for to get these opportunities.

Diva Marketing Blog lists a bunch of 2008 conferences. The NewPR wiki also lists a bunch of them, although I think Diva is more frequently updated.

Anything on YOUR radar that others could benefit from knowing about?

–Ellen

 Here is a presentation which was to be sent to the Lunch and Learn, outlining some marketing tips and etiquette for marketing to news/discussion groups.

news-discussion-groups.ppt

Here’s an interesting (and intuitive) survey result that showed people who use social networks (Facebook, YouTube, etc) also tend to use other techy products:

It’s a good lesson in demographic/interest targeting in online ad placements: if you want to sell a digital camera title, you don’t need to exclusively be on digital camera sites.

Juston