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?

So lots of people turn to an outside writer for help.  Is that a good idea?

Well, this turns out to have a lot of controversy in the Internet marketing community.  Some people think it’s unethical to publish content that others have written for you unless it’s clearly stated that way.  Others think it’s just like business as usual — when’s the last time the CEO actually wrote a press release?

Small Business Trends just published an article with some ‘ghostwriter’ guidelines for working with outside consultants for making content for your online promotion.  Here’s the issue in a nutshell:  the idea of blogs and other social media is that they are authentic expressions of opinion and experience by knowledgeable people.  But if someone outside your company ghosts the stuff for you, is it really authentic?  Remember that blogs, et al, are very personal expressions. The problem is really about that personal authority behind the statement which is posed in a different way online than it is in traditional corporate communications.

Personally, I think the ghostwriting is not only necessary but is fine to do as long as the information is valid/true and it is not published under an alias or someone else’s name.  You can easily publish blog posts as ‘Company X Staff’ and be truthful about it.

Here’s another attempt to deal with the ethics of the matter (link pulled from the article cited above).

My name is Glenn Silloway, owner of The Net Sells Internet Marketing firm, and these are my actual words.  I promise.

(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.