Google Adsense

Google’s Brin & Page Tap Into Their $2.75b Emergency Fund

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

What do you do when the economy is in the tank and you’re only making $1 a year in salary?

Well, if you’re Google’s Sergey Brin or Larry Page, you dump 15% of your company and pocket a cool $2.75 billion–each!

How does that compare to your emergency fund?

As many places are reporting, Brin & Page aren’t exactly dumping their shares on the market. It’s all part of a quite common practice by majority shareholders:

Under the trading plan, the co-founders would reduce their combined holdings in Google from about 57.7 million common shares, or approximately 18% of outstanding capital stock, to 47.7 million shares, or about 15% of the company, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange filing.

Under the stock trading plan, adopted on Nov. 30, 2009, the two would also reduce their combined voting shares from 59% to about 48%, the filing said.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists will wonder why this was put in place in November, but only announced two months later–but that takes us down a rabbit-hole that’s full of speculation.

The rest is here:
Google’s Brin & Page Tap Into Their $2.75b Emergency Fund

Planning a Customer Loyalty Program? Forget Social Media!

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

It’s not often that you’ll hear the advice to NOT bother with social media, but a new CMO Council report suggests that when it comes to customer loyalty programs, social media just doesn’t make sense.

While 60% of the 600 marketers polled, planned to make better use of the web and social networking tools, consumers say that’s not how to reach them. In fact, just 4% of consumers say they used social media–dropping to 3% when focusing only on blogs–to learn about customer loyalty programs.

Now, you could argue that the number is at 4% simply because companies are doing a lousy job of promoting their customer loyalty programs via social media, but the CMO Council suggests otherwise:

This finding is not surprising when you consider that consumers engaged in loyalty programs demand high-touch direct engagements, versus mass messages, regardless of channel.

This appears to be backed-up by the revelation that only 20% of business have yet to form any kind of loyalty program. So it appears companies have the right fishing pole, they’re just at the wrong lake.

So, who should you emulate? When surveyed, these are the companies that were top-of-mind when consumers think of the best loyalty program:

The keys to their success? Well, let’s flip it and look at what consumers didn’t like about the average loyalty program:

Too much spam and junk email topped the list of negatives associated with loyalty and rewards program membership (44 percent), followed by too many conditions and restrictions (38 percent), and rewards that lacked real value (37 percent). Other prevalent beefs included members having a hard time redeeming points or rewards, program membership lacking value, as well as communications and service not being personalized or targeted specifically for members.

The average US household is enrolled in 14 loyalty programs, but only active in 6 of them. The odds are in your favor, if you know where to engage consumers–and give them the benefits they want!

Here is the original post:
Planning a Customer Loyalty Program? Forget Social Media!

Email Users Grew by 100 Million in 2009, 81% of Them Were Spammers?

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Web site uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together a nice list of internet stats for 2009. Most of them are from studies and surveys already floating around the web, but Pingdom adds in some of its own metrics.

I had a lot of fun applying my own fuzzy math to a number of the startling statistics.

For example, the number of email users grew 100 million in 2009, to 1.4 billion worldwide. During the same period, email spam increased by 24%, with 81% of all emails being spam.

Now, I know that you can’t assume that 81% of new email users were spammers–one spammer could account for 1% of spam, all on their lonesome–but that just takes away all of the fun!

Another interesting observation. While Flickr is thought of as being the top image hosting site–with 4 billion images hosted–Facebook users upload more pics in a two-month span, than hosted by Flickr–about 2.5 billion per month.

And, just in case you thought the web-world rotated around North America, here’s a reason why you may want to provide language translation on your site:

Excerpt from:
Email Users Grew by 100 Million in 2009, 81% of Them Were Spammers?