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November 27, 2006: Don’t Read This: Shop Online Today Instead!

Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off to the holiday shopping season, is already history. Today, now that we’re back at work, it’s “Cyber Monday,” and instead of reading this, you really should be shopping online!

November 27, 2006: Sun Rising on Corporate Information Delivered by Blogs

Move over corporate news release. Blogs could soon be the next vehicle through which public companies release significant performance and financial data.

Securities and Exchange Commission head Christopher Cox has invited CEO and avid corporate blogger Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems to meet with the SEC on this very topic of allowing companies to disclose significant financial information using blogs.

November 13, 2006: Online Furniture Sales a Bulls-eye for Target?

Do a Google search on “online furniture sales” and you’ll get more than 15,800,000 results. Better add one more big player to that. As reported by Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis-based Target is in the furniture game in a big way, offering more than 5,000 pieces of furniture for sale—online.

November 02, 2006: The five things to know about Web analytics

ClickZ Expert Shane Atchison provides a virtual Cliffs Notes version of Web analytics for busy Chief Marketing Officers by highlighting five things they need to know:

October 24, 2006: Plan before you make the budget leap

It’s budgeting time in corporate America, and given the flow of money into the digital marketing space, marketing managers are dealing with a new set of strategic questions about online’s role in the marketing mix. ClickZ columnist Mark Kingdon offers up key questions for marketing executives to consider when mapping out 2007 budgets.

October 23, 2006: Hidden treats found in Halloween searches

Halloween apparently has ‘jumped the pond’ and is gaining in popularity in the UK, evidenced by spikes in internet searches for key Halloween terms such as “pirate costume” in both the US and UK.  So what? Hitwise blogger Heather Hopkins says that retailers can learn important lessons by understanding the way in which consumers search.

October 20, 2006: So long, TV theme songs

“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip. That started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship.” That introduction to the classic Gilligan’s Island theme song actually now portends a potentially fateful trip for TV theme songs. As John Berman reported on the Oct. 19th ABC News podcast, the sun appears to be setting on TV theme songs. Why? Networks are afraid viewers don’t have the patience to sit through these catchy tunes.

October 10, 2006: Measuring TV viewership in an unplugged world

A commercial from AT&T touts how you can watch the same program simultaneously on TV, PC and cell phone.  Add podcasts to the equation and you can see why the people at Nielsen Media Research have their work cut out for them.  It’s one thing to measure the network TV viewing habits of some 40,000 homes where the TVs are wired to report back to Nielsen. It’s an entirely different story when you try to measure what people watch on handheld devices or from people’s computers streaming network TV shows. Read more about how Nielsen is changing with the times.

September 29, 2006: Blogger to World: Internet Users Own the Media

As reported on the Sept. 28 ABC News Video, hosted by Charles Gibson, more than 100 million Americans watched video online last month. Said Gibson, “It is a new world, where no one source controls what we watch or listen too.” So ABC asked BuzzMachine.com blogger Jeff Jarvis to expound on the future of media.

September 25, 2006: Dodging ads with DVRs gets more difficult

Ready to zap that commercial with your digital video recorder? Go ahead, because advertisers have something in store just for you to see, whether you are in play mode or in fast-forward mode. Find out what Fox is up to in the U.K.

September 20, 2006: Web KPIs Gone Wild?

How many key performance indicators do you track on your Web site? Blogger Gary Angel cites one measurement guy whose colleagues had given him 300 KPIs to track. But what’s the point? Web KPIs gone wild is like taking a multi-vitamin: it includes every conceivable vitamin and mineral, even if you don’t need it.

September 11, 2006: Embrace the visual

How do you present tons of content to a 24/7, hurry-up-gotta-have-it-now, don’t-email-me-but-text-me-instead audience?  PR blogger Kevin Dugan suggests that PR writers “embrace the visual” to help their audience quickly understand complex data, and he illustrates how NewsMap does that just by organizing and displaying the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator.