Facebook is kicking sand in MySpace face.  And walking away with the prizes, too. Twitter has leveled off heading into fall — a lull?  or a ceiling?

Hitwise recent research shows some huge changes in the social media world over the past year. Facebook’s surge seems to be continuing as it climbs toward 400 million subscribers worldwide. First, here’s the numbers as reported in Online Media Daily:

The fall of MySpace must make Rupert Murdock’s teeth ache.  It still has lots of loyalty (a class-leading time on site nearly 30 minutes), but the numbers are hard to look at from an ad network’s point of view.  Nothing here about the demographics on MySpace, but my guess is it stills skews very young which makes it a good target for lots of products aiming at the college kids and younger.

Facebook, though, is catching on with the older crowd.  Fastest growing group on FB is 55+ — all those jokes about Grandma spying on her grandkids by getting on Facebook have been overtaken by the reality that Grandma’s circle of friends is getting into the game as well.  And Facebook is still about personal networks of friends keeping up with each other efficiently and in a convenient way online.

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?

At least according to Statcounter, Bing search engine edged past Yahoo into the number 2 spot in search. This was as of June 4th, and was true both worldwide and in the US. Whether Bing will hold this position over time remains to be seen.  Of course, you need to put this in perspective:  Google is still a huge leader in search, with about 87% of search worldwide (according to Statcounter).  Here’s what the trends look like:

Statcounter suggests the Bing gains are at the expense of Google — the lines in the graph suggest that. Could be true. We’ll see how it holds.

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.

Yup, it’s up. Latest ComScore data as reported on the ClickZ network shows an overall gain of 13% in unique visitors to social networking sites in 2008 vs. 2007, compared with a gain of 4% in total Internet audience. (Some of us remember when the total audience was growing double digits every year — yikes!  this Internet thing is maturing — digg down for the competition to heat up, folks!)

The details in the horserace are interesting. In the first place, nearly every social networking site they tracked had substantial gains for the year.  The biggest traffic sites continue to be #1 MySpace with a 10% gain and #2 Facebook with a 57% gain — which confirms our earlier post about how Facebook is taking it to MySpace.  Facebook is growing fast from a large base, and that’s impressive.

The only losers in the chart are Yahoo Groups (minus 13%), Webshots (minus 21%), and bringing up the rear, Windows Live Spaces (a whopping minus 57%).  Poor Microsoft.  Another loser.

Hitwise reports that online retail sales declined for the 8th week in a row.  Bright spots remain: house and garden, grocery and alcohol.  But if you are selling computers or music online, time to look even harder for good marketing outlets as well as cost savings.  This is not happening in a vacuum.  A NYTimes article reports a 0.3% decline overall in consumer spending, which is exceedingly rare. Reality bites–get serious about your marketing!