Now playing on thousands of screens:  TV is NOT dead!  In fact, we’re watching more of it (or at least the thing is on a lot).

The Center for Media Research has just published some  new numbers on media usage from Nielson.  Near as I can tell, almost no one is ever more than 30 seconds away from watching one screen or another.  And the trends are up, up and up.  If Ray Kurzweil is right, you will soon be organically connected to a screen, or really, become a part of it.

Anyhow, here’s some numbers marketers may love:

TV watchers (people tuned in) in US:

2nd quarter 2008:  281,746,000
2nd quarter 2009:  284,396,000 for .9% increase.

Internet users US:

2nd quarter 2008: 159,986,000
2nd quarter 2009: 191,035,000 for a 19.4% increase.

Watching video on a mobile phone:

2nd quarter 2008: 9,004,000
2nd quarter 2009: 15,267,000 for a 70% increase (from low base, but so what?)

We are consuming more and more and more media.  Jacked into the net anyone?

Do you like graphs and and charts?  This Inside Twitter post from Sysomos has an abundance of information about Twitter use and users.  You know the story but it’s still amazing to see the explosive growth in Twitter.  This chart speaks for itself:

Cumulative Growth in Twitter Users

The data for users looks pretty poor to me.  Very small proportion were  willing to give their ages, for example, but the report says that Twitter users skew extremely young.  That’s not my experience of it, of course, but I’m skeptical of that finding.  I think lots of older folks (“old” is over 40 in this case) are using it as a search tool, a diversion, a one-to-many communication tool.

As you might guess, Twitter use is highly concentrated.  It’s not just the 80-20 rule –  80% of Tweets are accounted for by 6% of users.  This pattern holds for lots of measures:  almost 2/3 of users have less than 20 followers, but a very small percentage have over 2000.  One interesting tidbit is that among people who identified themselves as marketers, about 15% follow 2000 or more, but of other users this percentage is under 1%.  Part of the marketing buzz about Twitter is self-fulfilling chatter — but on the other hand, these marketing types become a conduit for important messages to spread virally down the chain into the accounts of the folks who follow few people.  A new way for marketers to actually earn their dime:  they become the broadcast medium.

For all other commentators and I raise expectations of great things from Twitter, it has not yet made the big breakthrough to popularity in numbers.  Not that 20 million subscribers is puny!  But research published today by the Center for Media Research (based on a Harris poll) indicates Twitter is still reaching a small proportion of the audience, even among the 18 – 34 year old early adopters.

While 74% of the 18 – 34 group report having a Facebook or MySpace account, only 8% of them subscribe to Twitter and just 4% use it to send messages.  Twitter use to send messages is actually a bit higher among 35 – 44 year olds, at 5%, but the use of it drops to 1% or less for everyone over 45.

I still think Twitter will prove to be a game changer.  I don’t think it’s primarily a communication tool, however, which is what Facebook is.  It is a news source, and a search tool.  And as it grows (OK, if it grows) it will gather enough volume to allow specialized conversations about narrow topics of intense interest to any number of groups.  General news will spread virally among the groups through their interconnections, and search tools will capture information about queries in almost real time.

At some point, nobody will tweet about what they had for breakfast.  But they will report interesting things to people who care about the same things.

One complaint I hear from clients and students all the time is that their website’s traffic reports cannot possibly be right.  Or, on the other hand, I watch them counting ‘visitors’ as if the numbers represent actual people.  Neither is true.  Or completely wrong, either.

(Digression:  Winston Churchill once said that anytime you put two economists in a room you have two opinions.  Unless one of them is (was, obviously) Keynes, and then you have 3.  Opinions about online traffic stats are just about as varied as this — you need to get used to it.)

What got me started on this is a quote from Guy Kawasaki in an interview with Wordtracker’s Mark Nunney:

I learned that nobody really knows what their stats are because server logs, Google Analytics, and every service that purports to know “the truth” are all based on black magic.

Wow.  Should we just give up? For years we’ve been talking about how online marketing is different because we can measure traffic all the way to leads and sales, picking the paths that are most productive.  Now it’s down to ‘black magic?’

Not really, but there is certainly an element of truth in it.  I am constantly dismayed to find Google’s traffic estimates or advertiser competition estimates wildly out of whack with what I can observe in my own traffic data or search results.  Or, try a local search and 2 times out of three you get the 10-box (local results mapped with brief links adjacent) — but the 3rd time you don’t. Why does Google Analytics give me different information about my Pay Per Click account for a given period than AdWords itself does when the PPC account is directly linked via automated tagging?

These inconsistencies are not just ‘accidents’ or random noise introduced by the probabilistic functions of some overly-smart search engine’s algorithm, even though some really smart engineers might be able to ‘explain’ the anomalies. They are obtrusive evidence that we might not want to trust the search results, and maybe this is where some people get, just deciding that the search engines are a game to be played.

Well, I am a bit determinedly naive about some things, and this is one.  The SEs and our analytics tools do measure things probabilistically, and there is error in the results.  Plus, the measures depend on how well the hundreds of thousands (of millions) of hyperlinks are set up to track, and lots of them are not set up very well.  And they depend on whether the signals arrive via the measurement tools to begin with, and sometimes they don’t.

Then, there’s the human variation, thank goodness.  Humans have their own ideas about things like ‘cookies’ (good, OK, evil, dangerous, necessary, helpful, threatening) and they can delete those cookies whenever they want. Well, then the Google Analytics data is impaired for those visitors.  Research is difficult on this subject, for obvious reasons, but people who have tried to do it guesstimate that maybe 30% of surfers delete cookies.  That’s a lot of data.  And I bet it varies in unknown ways by market segment.

But if we use our data to estimate magnitudes, compare large volumes, watch trends over time, or identify specific tactics that work over a long period of time with adequate amounts of traffic data, we will learn real, useful information about our marketing campaign.  With enough time and traffic we WILL find out which keywords lead to conversions and which don’t.

Traffic stats are imperfect.  But I don’t think anyone wants to trade them in for a billboard on the freeway.

Advertising Age posts some data about Facebook and MySpace becoming more evenly populated by the generations.  What was once the outpost of mostly young people (after all, Facebook started as a college-only networking tool), is fast becoming a communication tool for people of all ages.

The largest group now on Facebook is aged 35 – 44, and the fastest growing segment is age 55+.  Don’t have your parents in your network if you don’t want them to hear about that long weekend fling, OK?  Some very interesting inter-generational things going on here.

But is it really ‘uncool’?  Not yet.  The numbers only show that the older generations are catching up.  Facebook is still the #1 Internet destination for college aged people, ahead of Google and Yahoo.  The big numbers are there for ALL generations, so if you target youth, go for it.  If you want to aim at their parents, still go for it, knowing that the proportion you will reach is less than for the young set (but growing).

As always, stay tuned.  This is moving so fast that we could see that sharply UP trajectory for Facebook to turn sharply down overnight as people get tired of keeping up with their online networks.  Or, what might have the same effect, prune them back to what they really wanted in the first place:  a network for real friends only which would be in most cases much smaller, much less ‘viral’.

People like video online. The growth of broadband has changed the way we organize content — we’re not in text anymore, Dorothy!  But how does it affect your rankings?

Really nicely according to Nate Elliot over at Forrester.  His team ran a test on how sites ranked in the major search engines for 40 of the most popular keyword phrases. The basic finding was that where videos existed in the pool of possibilities for a query, video boosted rankings.  They did some back of the envelope math and came up with the result that each video in the pool has an 11,000 to 1 chance of ranking on the first page, compared with a 500,000 to 1 chance for a basic text page.  Big difference (even if the math is a little wobbly).

The underlying message is that optimized videos are becoming more important — you still need to connect text to your videos in order to get them to display in search results. Elliot offers some basic video optimization tips, which I will not duplicate here since you can read them in his brief post.

I think for most small to medium sized businesses the biggest challenge will be to make the video in the first place.  Yeah, I know that any 8th grader can shoot a video and upload it, but that’s not the same thing as having a video that both promotes your business AND is interesting enough to get some viral distribution.  Plus, you need to have a good way to display it on your site.  It takes a little work — but it sounds like it’s worth it.

Nothing is more central to the onpage SEO than keyword selection and deployment.  I know I harp on this, but the search engines are trying to gauge relevancy, and they still do it mostly the old-fashioned way:  they read text.  What’s on your page is one of the two major sources of information (‘signals’ in insider lingo) the SEs use to rank your page.

A few days ago one of my favorite writers, P.J. Fusco of the ClickZ network, published some keyword analysis research that tested how the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) ranked pages for the keyword ‘fitness equipment’.  I instantly grabbed her table graphic showing results for my afternoon presentation at the Central Coast Wedding Professionals’ monthly meeting because the hows and whys of keywords on pages is so basic to SEO.

PJ Fusco's summary chart for keyword impact on rankings

There’s a lot of information here, but one take away is that the SEO guy who tries to play by fixed ‘rules’ (you need exactly 12 mentions of your keyword!) is wrong.  The variability is much higher than would fit with nice neat rules like that.  That’s not surprising when you realize Google uses in the neighborhood of 200 signals to evaluate a page (according to a number of bloggers — whatever the exact number, it isn’t trivial).

In fact, in a table I do not reproduce here, PJ found that the #1 ranking site for ‘fitness equipment’ on MSN does not use the keyword in the meta description, URL, alternative text, link text, bold or italicized text, or <H1> headers.  What the heck is that about?

Well, there’s inbound links for one thing.  There’s history.  There’s (mostly unknown) behavioral factors.  We do not know what is in those algorithms, no matter how much we test.

Does this mean you can/should ignore the onpage keyword SEO?  Of course not.  Especially if you don’t have tons of great, high quality inbound links, or your site is relatively new, but even if you are doing well in rankings — do what you can to make your site relevant to specific keyword queries that match your content and your offer. The broader message of the research is that 100% of the ranking sites used the keyword phrase in the title tag; the big majority used it in the meta description; and so forth (see the table).

As I always say, it’s not rocket science.  But it does require some research, attention to detail, and followup.  Success is the reward for thoughtful persistence.

In an interesting bit of research recently published, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that Internet participation has been increasing across ALL generations.  No surprise, the younger you are the more likely you go online using more channels (there’s a lot more 20-somethings at MySpace than there are older boomers).  But important to note that age is almost irrelevant to some kinds of online activities, like researching products:  all ages do that at about the same rate.

In other words, SEARCH and using online resources to learn about products and services is so common at all ages that it is a MUST for marketers no matter what you are marketing.

Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land posted some nice graphics about Pew’s Generations Online project.  I’ll share a couple tidbits here, but you might want to check it out.

It wasn’t surprising to me that the Gen X (ages 33-44) and younger Boomers (ages 45-54) make up a big chunk of the adult Internet population (45% of it between them), although the younger Gen Y group is proportionally larger (ages 18-32 with 30%).  And it wasn’t too surprising to see the pattern of certain Internet activities across these generations:  the younger you are the more likely to play online games, use social networking sites, or create a blog.

But what was a little surprising, and encouraging, was that for some activities, there is very little difference in participation rates across generations.  94% of Gen Y use email; 91% of the Silent Generation (ages 64-72) do.  90% of Gen Y use search engines; 85% of Silent.  65% of Gen Y makes online travel reservations; Silent: 69%.  Research products online:  Gen Y – 84%; Silent – 73%.

You get the picture.  Why it matters is this:  the activities that are most likely to lead to sales are common across generations.  Until we get a better handle on how to use all the social sharing, social networking, social news sites out there for marketing products, this will probably continue to be true.  And the change toward social media marketing is not going to be an easy road — the participants in those networks are sophisticated about their independence, and they (mostly) do not want direct marketing appeals.

We are left with limited options for social media marketing.  One important avenue is brand development.  Companies that operate in niches where they can have an impact via brand can benefit from participating in social media.

Of course, then they have to actually participate actively and faithfully, and that’s another story.

Owners of local small businesses now use the Internet more than any other source to find other businesses.  Yet only 44% of these owners actually have a website.  This gap is one of the main findings of new research from Webvisible and Nielsen , and reported as the ‘great divide‘ in the Marketing Vox post.

The research confirms that the Internet is increasingly the way people find local information.  82% of respondents in this study use search engines for local info compared with 57% who use Yellow Pages directories.  50% actually use the search engines first, compared with only 24% who turn to the YPs first.  A large majority of the searchers were satisfied with the online search experience even though they often had difficulty finding a specific business they were looking for.

Reading between the lines, this suggests that they found at least a similar business online, and perhaps used that instead of the one they were looking for in the first place.  As the Internet replaces other sources of local information, it will be ever more important for local businesses to have websites and to promote them.  That’s where their competition is.

This is a pesky issue for all of us in marketing, whether you are working online or in the ‘real’ world.  How does our traditional marketing effort affect our online effort?  And vice-versa.  Here are a couple posts from analytics guru Avinash Kaushik that can help you connect these dots in the ‘non-line’ world (offline – online – offline).  First, from a July post, here’s his thoughts on tracking offline conversions.  Like a lot of Avinash’s posts, this is long, but it’s worth it — you will find ideas to try, some of which are quite easy (like unique telephone numbers), that will give you a good idea about how much your website is driving offline conversions (online to offline impacts).  In his follow-up post near the end of December, you will find good ideas for tracking offline to online impacts.  Have fun!