For Century 21, a lot of first-time homebuyers are between the ages of 25-34, which is a group that is known for its social media activity. Gentile told us that Century 21 must follow these “digital natives” and reach them in the medium in which they spend most of their time – the social Web.

“I think, for brands, it’s essential that you learn how to communicate effectively in those channels to reach the consumer,” he said.

Gentile admits that, although social is significant in this day and age, it can be challenging for brands. He compared it to when brands first began to pull their advertising campaigns from print outlets and started advertising online. The challenging part for Century 21 is keeping the system members informed on the reasons for its decisions. However, Gentile believes that communication helps to overcome this challenge.

Many brands also struggle with finding ROI in social media. Gentile told us that Century 21 has been able to turn many “likes into leads” by attaching a custom Bit.ly link to every piece of content it puts out in the social space. By doing this, it can track a lead from wherever it originated, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., and see what the pattern of the consumer is.

Century 21 also recently released a new Facebook application that allows brokers to optimize their offices’ Facebook business page to better engage with consumers. Through the app, brokers can incorporate home listing info, Twitter feeds, blog posts, and more.

Gentile told us that Century 21 would continue to embrace social media in order to improve connections with not only its more than 112,000 sales agents, but also consumers.

One of the ads on Microsoft’s ad tools page offers to repair Microsoft products (which hints that Microsoft’s stuff is broken), while another ad is marginally relevant and leads to a no value arbitrage domain (IndustrialProducts.com) which redirects to another site syndicating Yahoo ads.

Then when the user appears on the thin arbitrage site Microsoft is buying the click back to market their own products.

Let us appreciate this brilliance:

1. paying advertisers to cheapen their brand and pollute your core product pages in important verticals with irrelevant spammy low (or no) value offers
2. sending away more traffic than they get back
3. losing money on the transaction

I have ranted about Yahoo! killing their keyword tool and doing nothing to rebrand or repair it, simply wasting thousands or millions of dollars worth of leads and marketshare each day. Disclaimer: my keyword tool just broke too, but I am trying to get it fixed ASAP. Yahoo! has other areas where they can offer you useful recommendations, but chose not to.

If you ever submit a site to the global Yahoo! Directory on the thank you page they recommend submitting your site to regional directories if your site is in multiple languages.

• That upsell offer is irrelevant for most people submitting their websites, and
• Yahoo! killed express inclusion for many of their regional directories years ago. The landing pages for the regional Yahoo! Directory submissions are broke. They do not even allow me to spend money if I want to.

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In October 2007, Aaronson picked up global notice after pointing out on his blog the word for word similarity between an advertisement for Ricoh and his notes.

"More intelligent, or simply more shameless?" Aaronson quipped. He openly wondered what to do from a legal standpoint about this.

Unlike most of our fast-draw litigation society here in America, the MIT-based assistant professor took a more measured approach to resolving the issue, even though under Australian law he could have tossed Ricoh’s ad agency, Love Communications, onto the proverbial barbie.

Aaronson described the settlement he reached with Love on a new blog post:

Disregarding the pleas of my relatives — who at this point were begging me to sue — I instead wrote to Love Communications directly, proposing a settlement to be donated (for example) to a mutually-agreed-upon Australian science outreach organization. We eventually agreed to a settlement of AUS$5,000.

Joel (Gilmore, BrisScience’s current director) proposed that we donate $2,000 of the settlement to BrisScience and $3,000 to the Physics Demo Troupe, the latter supporting a visit to the Torres Strait Islands in North Queensland. I agreed, and Love Communications agreed as well.

So ends the "sordid southern-hemisphere tale of sex, plagiarism, quantum mechanics, and printers" for Aaronson, who summarized the experience in brief: "That’s interesting." Science receives the benefits, and no court dockets were harmed in the reaching of the settlement.

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Send $2,000 to Dell, which both manufactures and sells the Google Search Appliance, and you’ll get a yellow piece of hardware in return.  You’ll also likely be listed on a page of “Mini Customer Success Stories.”  Some of the companies named there obviously aren’t in it for the link – what does the Arizona Federal Credit Union care about search engine rankings? – but others probably are.

Barry Schwartz points to Neutralize, which is in the business of search engine marketing.  And more than one company’s name ends in “.com” – it’s hard to believe they didn’t notice what they were getting into.

That’s not to condemn this practice – I find it more odd than objectionable, and Schwartz doesn’t believe any nofollow tags are necessary.  He points out, though, “I think Matt would think otherwise.”

Whatever anyone thinks, a change in the near future is unlikely – Schwartz also points out that Scott Woodard documented this practice about six months ago.

Searches for "black friday ads" are up 91 percent compared to last year, according to Hitwise, continuing a year-over-year trend since 2005. Since that year, similar searches have increased 954 percent, with 2006 seeing a 452 percent increase over 2005.

Wal-Mart is the biggest offline winner in that search as its online presence enjoyed the most Black Friday traffic for the week ending November 10, followed by Best Buy, Circuit City, and Sears.

"Consumers are becoming increasingly more knowledgeable about the availability of Black Friday promotions online and are actively seeking out the websites which offer the advertisements before public release," said Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise.

"Much to the chagrin of some retailers, shoppers are well-aware of the leaked promotions and are able to plan their Black Friday purchases before Thanksgiving arrives. While some retailers resist having their sales announced prematurely, others are embracing these sites as a customer acquisition opportunity."

Hitwise U.S. Retail Index Top 20 Websites
Ranking By Market Share of U.S. Visits for Week Ending Nov. 10, 2007
Rank	Name	Domain	Market Share	Weekly Percent Change
1	Amazon.com	www.amazon.com	11.49%	1%
2	Walmart	www.walmart.com	6.72%	5%
3	Target	www.target.com	4.64%	9%
4	Half.com	www.half.ebay.com	4.29%	-25%
5	Yahoo! Shopping	shopping.yahoo.com	3.18%	-1%
6	BestBuy	www.bestbuy.com	2.57%	8%
7	JC Penney	www.jcpenney.com	2.41%	4%
8	Smarter.com	www.smarter.com	2.38%	-1%
9	Overstock.com	www.overstock.com	2.33%	18%
10	BizRate	www.bizrate.com	2.27%	-3%
11	TOYS ‘R’ US – USA	www.toysrus.com	2.18%	10%
12	Shopzilla	www.shopzilla.com	2.01%	2%
13	QVC.com	www.qvc.com	1.96%	1%
14	Sears.com	www.sears.com	1.91%	16%
15	Circuit City	www.circuitcity.com	1.89%	3%
16	Dell USA	www.dell.com	1.86%	1%
17	Ticketmaster	www.ticketmaster.com	1.77%	10%
18	Lowe’s	www.lowes.com	1.35%	4%
19	The Home Depot	www.homedepot.com	1.32%	-4%
20	Kohls.com	www.kohls.com	1.27%	7%
*Note – The Hitwise Retail 100 Index does not include websites from the following categories – auctions, classifieds, computer manufacturers, relationship sales, reward point collecting and home entertainment – music download, DVD and video game rental. Data based on the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
Source: Hitwise

Indeed that chagrin has extended to cease-and-desist orders from companies like Wal-Mart looking to quell webmasters’ leaking of prices in advance. Wal-Mart recently sent out the C&D’s to bfads.net, where prices were published as early as October.

Best Buy, Target and Kohls have targeted FatWallet for similar breaches in years past. However, it is not clear if there is actual legal basis to their demands as factual information cannot be copyrighted.

Amazon continues to be the most-visited Website in the retail category, receiving 11 percent of all visits, followed by Wal-Mart, with six percent.

Just what, exactly, are the people looking for? If Hitwise’s top product searches are any indication, they’re looking for iPods, Wiis, Uggs, Xbox 360s, and Playstation 3s.

Top U.S. Search Terms Driving Traffic to Shopping & Classifieds Category
For the week ending November 10, 2007
Top Brand Searches		Top Product Searches
ebay		ipod
craigslist		wii
walmart		uggs
ebay.com		ugg boots
target		ipod touch
best buy		xbox 360
amazon		ugg
amazon.com		ipod nano
sears		playstation 3
craigs list		ipods
Source: Hitwise

1. The Growing Committee

Even at small companies (100-500 employees), the average number of people involved in a decision is 6.8. You need to answer all those people’s questions, and each has different concerns. This means you need to tailor your marketing materials to each of them. In fact, 77% of respondents to Marketing Sherpa’s survey say that targeting the content to their job role makes the content somewhat or significantly more valuable.

2. Use the Right Content at the Right Time

Not only do you need different content for each buyer role, you need to customize content for each stage in the buying cycle. This is also true since different buying roles tend to be more involved at different stages.

3. Getting Landing Pages Built & Tested

Marketers say the top reason why people don’t create landing pages is that they don’t have the time or resources. However, as Marketing Sherpa points out, using and optimizing your landing pages can improve conversion rates by 40% or more. Think about it: getting 40% more conversions for the same spending is a lot smarter than spending 40% more!

4. Being Everywhere

80% of decision makers say that they found the vendor. Does this mean you should give up or cut your marketing budget by 80%? Of course not. What matters today in marketing is to be findable when people are looking. This, of course, means being everywhere they might possibly be when they start searching.

There are two interesting implications to this.  First, it implies lots of cross-media, low-volume campaign all year long rather than spending your budget on one or two big programs. This way you can spread your budget across time period and channels.

Second, you need to focus your efforts where people look – and by far, this means managing your search engine marketing campaigns, especially on Google.

5. Handing Off the Right Leads

Less than 25% of the leads on your website are ready to speak with a sales rep. That’s why the best companies score their leads and then use lead nurturing to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet ready to speak with Sales. This means:

• The ability to dialog with qualified prospects through automated "drip marketing" campaigns
• Lead analytics to understand and score the prospect’s interests and intent
• Tight integration with SFA to automate tasks and track sales follow-up

To demonstrate the ROI of lead nurturing, Marketing Sherpa compared the results of all companies versus "best practice" marketers. They found that best practice companies pass only 12% of leads to sales (vs. 17% on average). But, 40% of those leads convert to prospects (vs. 34% on average) and to sales at 20% (vs. 16% average). The result is 9.6 sales per 1,000 leads, vs. 9.2 sales per 1,000 leads – which means more revenue. Also, they save costs as well, since they don’t waste as many high-cost resources like the direct sales channel.

Do you agree? Are these the top challenges on your mind?

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Hannah Montana Leads TV Costume Searches

In general, if originality is your goal, you should stay away from characters you see on TV – always prime sources for popular costumes. And, according to Yahoo, it doesn’t necessarily have to be TV from this decade.

The Flintstones make three appearances in Yahoo’s top 20 list, one appearance at number 5; the Addams Family still gets some love, as does "I Love Lucie," "I Dream of Jeannie," Scooby Doo, Star Trek and Charlie’s Angels.

Well, Star Trek shouldn’t be all that surprising, with all the fanatics out there. Star Wars was never a TV show, but if so, Google Trends says Star Wars costumes kick the Spock-ears off of Star Trek costume searches.

Nonetheless, your top 10 Halloween costume searches are as follows:

1.    Hannah Montana Costume
2.    High School Musical Costumes
3.    Sharpay Costume
4.    Dog the Bounty Hunter Costume
5.    Flintstones Costumes
6.    Reno 911 Costumes
7.    Scooby Doo Costumes
8.    GEICO Caveman Costumes
9.    Power Ranger Costumes
10.    Addams Family Costumes

Could be a biased sample as Google Trends has High School musical way outpacing Hannah Montana. If Dog the Bounty Hunter is popular, hopefully someone will buck the trend and go as his wife. Supplies: wig, tank top, shorts, two large balloons. 

I usually like to work in puns and expressions myself. "Green with envy," for example, requires a green jumpsuit, some face-paint, and cardboard "NV" on your chest. For the ladies, "Tickled Pink" is always a fun one.

Indeed, Microsoft was designated the top parent company, with a unique audience of over 118 million people.  And although Google’s audience outnumbered Yahoo’s (116.9 million vs. 110.6 million, respectively), the average user spent around 80 more minutes with Yahoo than with Google.

In terms of top brands, Yahoo achieved an even bigger lead; the company scored a time per person of around 3 hours and 20 minutes, while Google got just one hour and 12.  Google’s audience was once again bigger, but the gap, at least, was smaller (at 1.4 million people).

By now you’ve probably noticed that Nielsen//NetRatings scored things in a slightly unusual way.  “A parent company is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single entity,” states a press release.  “A brand is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content.”

“Nielsen also included a list of the top online advertisers with estimated spending for August, which included Low Rate Source, NexTag, Experian Group (EXPN), IAC, Countrywide (CFC), AT&T (T), NetFlix (NFLX), Verizon (VZ), Monster Worldwide (MNST), and Privacy Matters,” notes The Utility Belt’s Jon Fortt.  Don’t be surprised if some of those real estate-related brands slip, however, given the current housing market.

The analysis revealed that a record number of active Internet users visited newspaper Websites in the second quarter of 2007, increasing by 7.7 percent over the same time period last year. Over 59 million visited a newspaper Website in the US, or just over 37 percent of all users. The month of May especially was a record-breaker, surpassing the 60 million mark.

“As the industry continues to expand its digital portfolio, readers are visiting newspaper Web sites in record numbers for in-depth news and information as well as hyper-local information,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm in a statement.

“These sites continue to adapt to evolving consumer demands, frequently allowing user comments on articles and offering thought-provoking blogs to complement the journalistic excellence that makes newspapers a community’s most trusted resource.”

In all, users spent a combined 7.2 billion minutes reading newspaper Websites in the second quarter during their 1.4 billion total visits.

"Engagement is an important factor that reflects the value of online news products," said Sturm, "and the amount of time users spend enjoying a newspaper’s digital content further establishes these sites as premier online destinations for a demanding and sophisticated audience."

Overall, active Internet users averaged 2.6 billion page views, viewing an average of 45 pages per person, for almost 41 minutes per session per person, and visited nearly eight times each.