I thought this article was interesting considering Facebook's recent IPO filing.

Facebook reaches more than half the world's internet population outside of Asia, and the company itself expects user growth to slow thanks to the law of large numbers. So to fuel the growth expected of it as a public company, it will have to double down on advertising, including two key areas: mobile and local.

Facebook's revenue grew 88% in 2011 to $3.71 billion, according to its IPO filing, but Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst at Global Equities research, thinks year-over-year growth should be north of 100% for the next five years to justify a $100 billion valuation.

"I would say $50 to $60 billion would be the ideal valuation, considering the future is uncertain," Mr. Chowdhry said.

In terms of new revenue streams, Facebook has an expanding "Payments" business, composing about 15% of 2011 revenue. It takes a cut of transactions made through its virtual currency of "credits," the majority of which come from Zynga. And Facebook is expected to begin delivering ads to its 425 million mobile users this spring, possibly before it goes public, though it will need to exercise restraint so as not to disrupt the user...

For more on this article, please go here.

I always love to hear what other people think is the hottest and best way to market, either online or otherwise. Here's a writer's take on what to look out for in 2012. Are these included in your media plans?

DECEMBER 26, 2011 · BY ARMANDO ROGGIO

Marketing techniques that worked in the past may be far less successful in this emerging era of mobile devices, personalization, and social media.

What follows are five suggestions for potentially potent marketing tactics for the coming year. These are not wholly new techniques, but rather ones that could grow in importance and effectiveness in 2012.

Text Marketing

Responsys, a marketing software provider, believes that text messaging — called SMS by the more technically inclined — will be an important marketing vehicle in 2012. Specifically, Responsys expects companies to use SMS marketing to uncover shopper preferences.

For example, a business might send a text to its SMS list offering a $5 gift card in exchange for answering a question like "What's your favorite thing to do in the kitchen?" When the SMS subscriber texts back, "bake," marketers will know to send that customer baking-related offers, Responsys explained.

SMS marketing will also be important for "flash" offers that give shoppers deep discounts within a limited time frame. This is especially effective for multi-channel merchants.

Mobile Optimized Merchandising

There are more than 90 million smartphone users and 24 million tablet users in the United States, according to shopping personalization firm RichRelevance. The company, which works with many large online retailers, believes mobile commerce will grow significantly in 2012, continuing its upward climb.

"U.S. online retail dollars attributable to mobile devices has doubled from 1.87 percent in April 2011 to 3.74 percent in December 2011," RichRelevance reported in a published statement.

While many online retailers have already "optimized" their sites for mobile devices, at least some of these mobile offerings lack the on-site merchandising common on full-version websites.

In 2012, smart marketers will work to better integrate up-selling, cross-selling, and similar online merchandising into the smartphone-friendly versions of their sites.

Subscriptions on the Rise

In 2012, online retailers should seek to sell subscription services when and where it makes sense. And these services need not be limited to magazines or the like, but could include just about any product one could imagine.

Consider three online retailers that are using subscription models to sell right now.

Quarterly.co lets shoppers subscribe to receive physical items selected by an influential and tasteful contributor. Specifically, a shopper could pay $25 a quarter to have Mike Monteiro, co-founder of Mule Design, choose an item for them. Likewise for $25 per quarter, a shopper could get an item and several stories written by children from the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, which is part of a not-for-profit tutoring and writing workshop center in New York.

Essentially, Quarterly.co has customers paying $100 per year for whatever the company sends.

For more on this article, please go here.

In a new global research report released today by IDG Research Services, two-thirds of the technology marketers surveyed said they expect their budgets to rise on average 3.5% next year compared to this year. Digital programs will capture half the spend with 58% on demand generation and 42% on branding. Events is second at almost 24%.
2012 Marketing And Ad Budget Allocation (Technology Products or Services)
Product or Service % of Budget
Digital 50.1%
Events 23.9
Print 13.9
Broadcast 5.1
Other 6.9
Source: IDG, November 2011
The survey found that digital spend is evenly split between branded tech media sites, with more than 51% and a combination of ad networks, exchanges without real-time bidding (RTB), and RTB systems. 39% plan to spend more on branded sites in 2012 than this year, and 31% of the respondents plan to increase ad network funding.
Sites For Planned Digital Spend in 2012
Type % Budgeted Spend
Branded Content 51.2% (39% spending more than 2011)
Ad networks 27.3% (31% spending more than 2011)
Ad exchanges/DSPs 15.3%
RTB 6.2%
Source: IDG, November 2011
As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%. As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.
Digital Budget Spending Priorities 2012
Ad Type Share of Budget
Lead Generation 26.6%
Display/Banner 19.6
Search 18.8
Email 11.7
Sponsorship/Custom 9.7
Digital Video 7.8
Rich Media 5.9
Source: IDG, November 2011
By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance. Vendors are significantly more likely to rely on social media indicators; agencies look to metrics that lend themselves to ROI computations.
Important Metric Evaluation Considerations
Metric % Utilizing
CTR (Click through rate) 80%
Cost per engagement 59%
Interaction rate 55%
Source: IDG, November 2011
Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012. Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of content marketing or custom programs.
Custom Content Marketing Spending Priorities (% of Tech Marketers)
Category % of Tech Marketers Investing
Collateral 71%
Webcasts/virtual events 61
Videos 59
Research 5
Articles/features 54
SEO, SEM, SMO optimized 51
Source: IDG, November 2011
Agencies are much more inclined to use custom within media sites/programs than vendors (50% vs. 28%). When asked about the biggest challenges in producing marketing content, marketers cited producing enough material, creating engaging content and measuring the results. Approximately two-thirds of the marketers indicate they will outsource one or more projects involving content creation, creative development, ad unit creation and online production/services.
Content Marketing Content Challenges (% Respondents Considering “Biggest”)
Challenge % of Respondents
Producing enough content 49%
Producing engaging content 48
Measuring results 39
Delivering content to right audience 37
Lack of budget 37
Lack of consistent content strategy 32
Lack of talent to produce content 31
Source: IDG, November 2011
75% of respondents noted that programs are meeting or exceeding expectations, though issues exist around lack of standard metrics, a shortage of experience with social media, and lack of budget. When compared to mobile marketing, social is out front in adoption, 95% to 64%. This indicates that for many marketers, social has advanced beyond the experimental stage unlike mobile. Of note is that almost half of the marketers will devote funds to tablet ads next year.
Matthew Yorke, President, IDG Global Solutions, concludes by saying that “... marketers are following their customers and prospects who are relying on social, mobile, and video in rapidly increasing numbers... a multiplatform world has been added to the multichannel world... “
For additional information about the study, including links to charts and slides, please go here.
Respondents to the IDG survey included 185 tech marketers and 89 agency professionals. 86% of the participants were from the United States.

My sister just moved to China, so I found this article to be interesting. She was telling me that people in China are most interested in working and shopping. Please read, comment, and share.

Best,

Marne

By OWEN FLETCHER
Growth in China's e-commerce sector is shifting toward sites that sell goods directly to consumers over those that focus on bartering between individuals, boosting online retailers such asBeijing Jingdong Century Trading Co. and forcing industry giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to adapt.


Companies like Jingdong, which sells a broad range of goods on its 360buy.com website, are raising funds and racing to expand their share of online business-to-consumer sales in China, a market that is forecast to triple in size over the next two years.
Alibaba Group has responded to the intensifying competition by splitting up its dominant Chinese e-commerce sites—Taobao Mall, which hosts online stores run by other businesses, and Taobao Marketplace, a trading service that links individual buyers and sellers—into separate units to help drive growth.
Meanwhile, a growing number of online retailers selling niche products like lingerie or electronics are opening up shop, while companies that haven't traditionally focused on e-commerce, such as Chinese search engine Baidu Inc., also are looking to jump into the growing market.
"Generally what we see is competition will become more fierce in [the business-to-consumer market] in the near future, but it's still more promising than [the consumer-to-consumer market] in the long term," says Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-based research firm BDA China Ltd. Online sales by businesses are taking market share from consumer-trading websites in China, especially in the country's biggest cities, Mr. Clark says.
Center of the Battle
Sales on Chinese business-to-consumer websites are expected to more than triple to 650 billion yuan, or about $102 billion, in 2013 from around 198 billion yuan, or $31 billion, this year, Beijing research firm Analysys International estimates. By 2013, business-to-consumer sales will account for 47% of total online sales in China, up from 25% this year, Analysys says.

For the rest of the article, please go here

It's coming...the digital media revolution. Well, actually, it's already here. Print companies have been scrambling over the last five years or so because they knew readership would be down by 2012. The time is here, so what is to come of it? Here's an article that I found that talks about this very issue for The Atlantic. Please comment and share, Marne

At 154, a Digital Milestone
By JEREMY W. PETERS
The Atlantic owes its name and legacy to the 154-year-old monthly magazine founded by New England literary greats like Ralph Waldo Emerson. But in October, the company marked a very modern milestone: digital advertising revenue exceeded print advertising revenue for the first time.

For any magazine publisher to take in the bulk of its advertising revenue from online sources is incredibly rare. Publishing industry executives said they were not aware of any examples of a brand as prominent as the Atlantic doing so.


The cover of The Atlantic’s December issue. The magazine was founded in 1857.
But for the last few years, The Atlantic has been undergoing a gradual evolution from a magazine publisher to a multimedia company with a collection of successful Web sites that also happens to put out a magazine once a month.

“When I started in ’08, digital was 9 percent of our total ad revenue,” said Jay Lauf, publisher of The Atlantic. “With digital, everybody in the business is always talking about trading print dimes for digital dollars. Well, for the first time we’re actually beating print.” October’s split was 51 percent digital, 49 percent print.


The Atlantic, which expects to make about $18.6 million from advertising this year, or slightly more than half of its total revenue, said the growth in its online share of business was not because of a decline in the share of print revenue. It sold more ads in the October issue of the magazine than it had in any other issue since David Bradley bought it from Mortimer B. Zuckerman in 1999, Mr. Lauf said.

Traffic at TheAtlantic.com and its successful news and aggregation site The Atlantic Wire has grown despite the loss of some popular bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, who announced in February that he was leaving The Atlantic for The Daily Beast.

Over the last five months, Quantcast measured global monthly visitors to TheAtlantic.com at 5.4 million — 3.6 million of them in the United States. That is more than The Daily Beast’s 3.3 million monthly domestic visitors, but less than Time.com’s 9.1 million, according to Quantcast. Monthly domestic traffic to The Atlantic Wire is another 1.3 million visitors.

Many magazine executives see their advertising businesses gradually relying more and more on digital revenue even if few of their companies are as far along as The Atlantic. But getting there will most likely take a lot longer for others than it did for The Atlantic, which is smaller and has lower advertising rates compared with other publications in the so-called thought leader category like The New Yorker.

Keeping the brand strong and valuable across all platforms will be what keeps the company growing, said Robin Steinberg, director of publishing investment and activation at MediaVest. “While I applaud the evolution of their overall business model, the total strength in revenue of their brand is what’s most important.”