ComScore recently did a research, which found that among 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Russia has the world’s most engaged social networking audience, with the average online Russian spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per month.

Brazil ranked close behind Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The US ranked at #9  in terms of social network engagement, with an average of 4.2 average hours and 477 pages consumed per visitor.

I was surprised at once, because I thought that the Asian countries will definitely top the ranking. But neither China, Korea, or Japan is even showing up in this top-20 list. So I looked closely and found out that this data/research doesn’t include the internet Cafe or mobile web browsing…

This is really a good example of showing how mis-leading a social networking research could be. In my opinion, this research totaly ingored the big social networking factor - how it’s being social networked. In other words, in what way people are socializing. Without Internet Cafe data, China of course will not show up; without mobile web browsing, Japan, Korea, South Africa or China will probably not show up. Because that’s how people in those countries socialize. If you cut their main social networking platform, there is no way to understand how they are engaged.

Here is the list of the top 20 countries from ComScore research:

Tags: Australia, Canada, china, ComScore, mobile, Puerto Rico, Russia, Social network service, social networking, Spain

You are what you clikced on, or, you are what sites you visited… this website discovery visualization tool tells you what other sites people also visited. It’s sort of like Linkedin for websites.

Below are some of my finding. Try it out youself

• Yelp’s site network: VirginAmerica is also connected with Yelp - my biggest surprise! Maybe VirginAmerica is targeting at all food networks for advertising purposes, because people use food sites especially when they are traveling? Interesting!

• Twitter’s site network: it’s all the tools that people use around twitter. The power of having API? Or a sign of improvement that Twitter needs?

• Difference between Facebook and Linkedin site networks:

It’s fun to play around with it. Try it yourself!

Tags: advertising, Application programming interface, linkedin, On the Web, Online Communities, social network, Twitter, website discovery, Yelp

Here is my weekly wrap up around the online market research and trends:

February’s top 50 web properties: Romance, Taxes & Hulu from comScore

• This is really lovely and encouraging (especially in the economy like now): “Valentine’s Day was a key driver of online activity in February;
• What’s surprising to me is: Hulu, the online video joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp., surged 55% to 7.8 million unique visitors in February
• Traffic to tax sites surges as tax season continues
• Bargain hunters seek budget travel deals

Up and Downs of Big Brands

• according to CoreBrand, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson have maintained the #1 and #2 spots on a list of top companies with the most “Brand Power” in the US
• JApple continues to grow its corporate brand and now ranks at #91, up from #119 in 2007 and #128 in 2005
• Credit card company brands are improving: Visa is now #23, up from #36 in 2007 and #44 in 2005; MasterCard is #31, up from #44 in 2007 and #57 in 2005, and American Express is #11, up from #13 in 2007 and #16 in 2005
• Starbucks had a notable loss as it dropped from #10 in 2007 to #14 in 2008
• PepsiCo has been dropping at an alarming rate and has gone from #4 in 2005 to #11 in 2007 and to #18 in 2008
• General Electric is losing steam, dropping from #12 in 2005 to #17 in 2007 to #24 place in 2008
• Procter & Gamble has dropped steadily from #31 in 2005 to #39 in 2008
• General Motors has fallen steadily from #30 in 2005 to #41 in 2008
• The full report can be downloaded as PDF

Hitwise: online search queries get wordier

Generations Online in 2009 Report from Pew Internet

No surprise: social is the main activity that young generation are living with online

Tags: American Express, Coca-Cola, ComScore, Hulu, internet trends, market intelligence, market trends, NBC, NBC Universal, Procter & Gamble, Valentine's Day

To help you digest all the web trends during the week, I decided to start my weekly wrapup posting on each Friday. So you can quickly capture the top trends on web traffic, technology, search, retailers and other trends.

Traditional retailers have a lot work to do with their search results

• Based on Internet Engine’s recent study, Online retailers represent more than 30% of the search listings from a typical online retail search on a major search engine, while brick-and-mortar stores only show up in searches 12% of the time
• Free vs. Paid Results Show More Dramatic Difference: the free or organic listings of the traditional retailer websites have only a 2% share of the total listings. This is dramatically smaller than the share for free listings for eCommerce sites at 17%, shopping comparison sites at 11% and manufacturers’ websites at 10%.

Top 50 web properties for January: Tax, Career job sites, Travel are getting popular. More detail

Web Transaction performance Indexes look at both Credit Card Web Transaction and E-Banking Web Transaction Performances. More detail

A study looked at who are America’s Fashion Conscious: Single, Coastal Women Using Amex. More detail

Search terms on the rise in Dec: Unemployment, Coupons, Discount and Bankruptcy. More detail

Tags: fashion conscious, retailers, search, tax, web transaction performance, web trends, weekly wrapup

While putting these Amazon numbers together, I keep wondering where Amazon is going:

• Amazon recent sales and shares:

For the fourth quarter of 2008, Amazon sales up 18% to $6.70 Billion; 2008 Free Cash Flow Grows 16% to $1.36 Billion. There were already some early indications that Amazon had a strong holiday season, most notably the company’s announcement that it set a single day record for orders on Dec. 15. We have to keep another data point in mind, that online holiday shopping falls 3 percent overall.

Not surprise, Amazon shares skyrocket after the company released its fourth quarter results.

• Amazon’s biggest job growth

Its employment had risen to 20,700 people as of the end of January 2009. That translates into net growth of 3,700 people — the company’s biggest annual jump in nearly a decade. In this current economy environment, it’s rare how Amazon keeps hiring while most of other companies are cutting back.

• Amazon’s big year of Acquisition

The company spent $432 million on acquiring companies in 2008, more than ten times the amount in 2007. As TechFlash mentioned, Much of Amazon’s 2008 acquisition bill is likely due to Audible. Amazon acquired the audiobook company last year for a reported $300 million. Amazon also acquired Abe Books, an online seller of used, rare and out-of-print books; Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers; and Fabric.com, an online fabric store. Amazon’s Internet Movie Databse (IMDb) acquired Withoutabox, an indie film distributor.

The 2008 number is striking given Amazon’s relatively restrained acquisition spending in recent years. In 2004, Amazon spent $75 million on Chinese web retailer Joyo.com.

I’ll keep watching Amazon as it is so interesting to see where it’s heading towards.

Tags: amazon

Based on e-tailing’s annual survey, here are some recommendations for online merchants to optimize their website features to improve sales:

• Rethinking promotions

Merchants are creatively rethinking promotional strategies to get the sale immediately, as evidenced by limited-time-only promotions’ jump to 42% penetration (i.e., use by retailers) in 2008 from 18% in 2007.

The use of Online Outlets increased 14 percentage points in penetration. With 86% of merchants now deploying this tactic, a dedicated well-merchandised location to attract price-sensitive shoppers deserves attention.

Free shipping, not surprisingly, remains a promotional standard offered by more merchants in diverse manners that complement their business models, including an increase in conditional free shipping to a store (26% in 2008 vs. 15% in 2007).

• Refining search

Putting control in the hands of the customer, merchants are capitalizing on search usage and tools via onsite capabilities–from landing-page sorts to creative ways of finding product.

Keyword search is the standard-bearer, as 100% of the sites surveyed have the feature.

Beyond that, a majority of merchants are implementing in-depth refined search (85%), providing guided navigation (63%), and landing page sorts (77%) in part replacing advanced search (15% vs. 23%) as these newly tracked metrics provide fewer click-throughs to reach the desired product.

• Retooling content/information

The use of video and audio increased significantly from 2007 levels, with video penetration up to 62% from 45% in 2007, and use of audio reaching 61% penetration among surveyed e-tailers.

Customer education is paramount, and here too category-centric content elevates the shopping experience while interactive tools ensure customers make the right choice, according to e-tailing group.

• Reinventing community

“Share” is a new metric in the e-tailing group survey; merchants’ sharing strategies range from the old-fashioned to the new as they test various means throughout their sites.

Anticipate increased usage of sharing as shoppers become more comfortable with sharing and merchants understand the viral power of cost-effective community initiatives, e-tailing group said.

Original post is here

Tags: ecommerce, etailer, online merchants

Email

• 1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
• 70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.
• 53.8 trillion – The number of spam emails sent in 2008 (assuming 70% are spam).

Websites

• 186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
• 31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.

Web servers

• 24.4% – The growth of Apache websites in 2008.
• 13.7% – The growth of IIS websites in 2008.
• 22.2% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2008.
• 336.8% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2008.
• 100.3% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2008.

Domain names

• 77.5 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2008.
• 11.8 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2008.
• 7.2 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2008.
• 174 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains.
• 19% – The increase in the number of domain names in 2008.

Internet users

• 1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide (June 2008).

• 578,538,257 – Internet users in Asia.
• 384,633,765 – Internet users in Europe.
  
• 248,241,969 – Internet users in North America.
• 139,009,209 – Internet users in Latin America/Caribbean.
• 51,065,630 – Internet users in Africa.
• 41,939,200 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,204,331 – Internet users in Oceania/Australia

Blogs

• 133 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by Technorati).
• 900,000 – The number of new blog posts in a day.
• 329 million – The number of blog posts in 2008.

Images

• 10 billion – Photos hosted by Facebook (October 2008).
• 3 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (November 2008).
• 6.2 billion – Photos hosted by Photobucket (October 2008).

Videos

• 12.7 billion – The number of online videos watched by American Internet users in a month (November 2008).
• 87 – The number of online videos viewed per month per Internet user in USA.
• 34% – The increase in viewing of online video in USA compared to 2007.
• 3.1 – The number of minutes of an average online video.

Original post is from here

Tags: internet

Based on Hitwise’s finding, “the weekly market share of visits to coupon websites increased 15% from the previous year during the week of Thanksgiving & Black Friday and also increased 16% during the week of Cyber Monday. Overall, visits to the custom category of 70 websites increased 17% and 12%, in November and December, respectively, as compared to the previous year.”

It’s more interesteting that “many shoppers are looking for coupons from a specific retailer or brand, suggesting that many coupon searchers may be further along in the purchasing funnel and are close to making the purchase - but may need some type of final incentive. For the week ending December 27, 2008, 69% of the searches for the top 300 search terms that include ‘coupons’ also included a specific brand such as Pizza Hut, JCPenney, or Target. The other 31% of searches to include the term ‘coupons’ were generic in nature, seeking out grocery coupons, online coupons, and free printable coupons.”

Here is the original Hitwise post

Tags: coupon, deals, shopping

Some helpful information that I found from Anderson Analytics’s survey:

Good to Great remained the most widely read and most recommended book. However, several new books appeared on the reading list this year including: Groundswell, Hot Flat and Crowded, The Black Swan, Predictably Irrational, Mavericks at Work, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, The Art of the Start, Purple Cow, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and Our Iceberg is Melting.

The number-one business Guru last year, Seth Godin, remained the favorite marketing guru for 2009, according to the survey. However, Warren Buffet and Malcolm Gladwell increased significantly in popularity and now occupy the #2 and #3 spots on the list, respectively. Jim Stengel also made the Marketing Guru list for the first time this year.

“This year we saw an increase in importance in several areas, not just ‘customer satisfaction’ and ‘retention,’” said Tom H.C. Anderson, managing partner of Anderson Analytics. “There were also significant increases in the importance of marketing concepts such as ‘CRM,’ ‘data mining’, and  ‘leading through analytics.’ That together with interest in books like The Black Swan and optimism on market research budgets signals marketing executives realize that in a down economy, it’s even more important to utilize information efficiently and keep the customers you have.”

About the survey: Anderson Analytics conducted the Marketing Trends 2009 Survey among 643 current MENG members between Nov. 15 and Dec. 2, 2008. Anderson Analytics used text-mining software to code open-ended/free form text answers to questions in order to understand what issues were top-of-mind.

Tags: books, marketing

As an active online shopper, I found it interesting to see the overall consumer shopping trends:

• Overall, only 51% of consumers visited a department store this holiday season, compared with 73% who visited Wal-Mart
• nearly 25% of consumers reported that they visited Macy’s less in 2008 than 2007, while only 7% visited Macy’s more
• Nearly 20% of consumers spent more than a year ago, while 54% reported spending less
• For the first time in the nine-year history of the study, the primary driver was price over selection as the reason for why customers changed the store where they purchased
• For the first time in many years, Wal-Mart was more effective in attracting new customers than Target

More data points are from MarketingChart.com

Tags: consumer, shopping, trends