We’ve always thought digital and traditional media work best in sync with each other.  Traditional media will never really go pouf and disappear, it will always have a role. What’s happening now is that digital seems to be surging to the head of the line.

In 2005  Joseph Jaffe proclaimed how the 30 sec TV spot was on its way out.  How Pepsi had just announced the relaunch of Pepsi One without TV ads.  See Jaffe’s book here.

 ”People who think the 30-second spot is still alive might want to reconsider their statement in view of the announcement to relaunch Pepsi One without TV ads,” Jaffe said.

Fast forward to the 2009 Super Bowl and Hulu, an online video outfit supported by NBC Universal, FOX and ABC Disney.  By placing two TV spots in the Super Bowl Hulu increased visits to its website by 49%, and the growth has been sustained.  See the 3 minute Ad Age interview with Hulu CEO here.

No doubt, media habits are evolving with the internet. Yet this is a good example of old and new working in sync, the TV spot may not die after all.  Better chance that it will  be reincarnated as…….not making any proclamations on that.

In radio the 1% rule means that only 1% of the listening audience actually calls in. Everyone else just listens.  The web has, or I should say had, a 1% rule.

The 1% rule is a widely shared behavioral theory that states that the number of people who really create content on the Web represent only 1% of the people actually viewing (or lurking) the content. It suggests that 99% of Internet users are just reading and watching. But the latest from Forrester Research shows a very different reality, check the chart below on the latest online activity by US online adults.

Hat tip:  Advergirl

No doubt Barack Obama owes much of his campaign’s sucess to the intelligent use of the Internet.  But he’s really taking high speed internet adoption in the U.S. seriously.  In a Dec 6 NYT article he’s quoted —

 “It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption,” Mr. Obama said. “Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online.”

Link to NYT article here.

Murdoch gets how the Internet is transforming the news and newspapers.  Audio of lecture here.

Money quote:

Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than ever before. And they have more sources of information than ever before. Amid these many diverse and competing voices, readers want what they’ve always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future.

If you discuss the future with newspapermen, you will find that too many think that our business is only physical newspapers. I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone. But our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment. It’s true that in the coming decades, the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we’ll see gains in circulation—on our web pages, through our RSS feeds, in emails delivering customized news and advertising, to mobile phones. In short, we are moving from news papers to news brands.

The challenge is to use a newspaper’s brand while allowing readers to personalise the news for themselves—and then deliver it in the ways that they want. This is what we are now trying to do at The Wall Street Journal. The journal has the advantage of having a very loyal readership … a brand known for quality … and editors who take the readers and their interest seriously. This helps explain why the journal continues to defy industry trends. Of the ten largest papers in the United States, the journal is the only one to have grown its paid subscriptions last year. At the same time, we intend to make our mark on the digital frontier. The journal is already the only US. newspaper that makes real money online. One reason for this is a growing global demand for business news and for accurate news. Integrity is not just a characteristic of our company, it is a selling point. One way we are planning to take advantage of online opportunities is by offering three tiers of content. The first will be the news that we put online for free. The second will be available for those who subscribe to wsj.com. And the third will be a premium service, designed to give its customers the ability to customize high-end financial news and analysis from around the world.

After posting video of Girl Talk doing a quick mashup I realized many people might need a quick rundown on Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking, may not be sure about what a mashup is exactly or what RSS means and how it works.

So, here is a quick glossary that explains the various aspects of Social Media and Social Networking.

Mashups:  A mashup brings together multiple sources of data and creates a single application, often created as a Web service. Awards are in fact given for the best mashups. Snag films is a great example of a  new “mashup” on the scene.

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Technorati Profile

Last Saturday I presented an overview of online marketing to a group of Rotary Club members in San Diego. Many wanted the presentation sent to them since it reviewed many online marketing tools. To make it easier and more useful for everyone I’m posting most of the information presented on this blog in three sections with links to many online marketing tools.

Website content drives activity: If you want visits to your website you need to give people a reason to visit, this means content that is relevant and useful to them laid out in a user friendly manner. And most important, content that is updated on a regular basis. So, it is important to have some sort of easy to use content management system built into your site so members can update the site. You can also use RSS to constantly feed your site the latest news from around the world or around the corner — RSS

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Most people use Internet (or Net) and World Wide Web (or Web) interchangeably - but in reality, they’re quite different:

• The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks - these computers exchange data (hypertext documents like the one you’re reading now, emails, file transfers, and so on).

• The Web is a system of documents linked via hypertext that is accessed via the Internet - so the Web is just a part of the Internet.

The Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as he was knighted in 2004 for his contributions to the Web) while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Sir Berners-Lee was just 34 years old at the time. (Photo credit: captsolo [Flickr])

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Apparently Cuil is how you say “cool” in Ireland, according to search engine upstart Cuil. They just launched and are claiming to have a search index of over 120 billion pages, three times greater than Google’s. But, on their official blog, Google claims to have recently hit a search index milestone of 1 trillion pages, sort of, since Google does not actually index those 1 trillion pages.

No doubt, the web is huge and getting bigger. And Google continues to have upstarts nipping at their ankles, except that the Cuil team is made up of former Google engineers offering a few unique twists.

1. Rather than trying to mimic Google’s method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to websites Cuil’s technology drills into the actual content of a page.

2. Cuil’s results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

3. Cuil is promising not to retain information about its users’ search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

These are great features for many. Yet it may be too late to make a difference. Although Facebook recently managed to surge ahead of Myspace, in the world of search Google’s dominance may be much tougher to overcome.

According to comScore, more than 87 million people — nearly half of all internet users in the U.S. — are using widgets. Couple that fact with the 49 percent of the U.S. adult internet population expected to engage in online social networking on a monthly basis this year, and the opportunity for branded interaction becomes downright spectacular.

Ok, so, what is a widget? For the purpose of an advertising campaign, widgets are applications with valuable or sharable content such as audio, video, games and animation and, to the user, are most interesting or valuable when that content changes or gets dynamically updated.

For example, some of the most popular widgets on Facebook (now gaining more new users than myspace, according to the drudge report) are iLike and The Compass.

The iLike widget lets you list the songs you like, lets you know of concerts in your area, and gives you recommendations based on your Facebook music and friends. This widget is the most popular on Facebook with 633, 717 users.

The Compass widget, from the Washington Post, presents a simple survey to determine your political leanings, and presents you with a compass on your Facebook profile page to let everyone else know. 98,110 users have opted for this one.

The above are just a couple of examples of smart, useful and entertaining widgets. Advertisers can develop and distribute their own branded widgets to audiences via a website, a rich media banner, blog or even via another widget. The inherent value of a widget lies in the fact that they keep the user continually connected to the brand.

Widgets become even more valuable to advertisers when users are able to easily grab them and showcase them externally: in their blogs, their websites or perhaps, most compellingly, in their personal social networking spaces, such as Facebook. This allows users to share and showcase their affinity for specific brands, products and causes. A particularly effective way to leverage digital word of mouth.