Facebook Leads To Jobs
Over 18 million people claim that Facebook is the reason they have their current job. According to a post on Mashable, Facebook is leading the way in a massive wave of social media serving as a means to help people find jobs. LinkedIn and Twitter were also cited in the report as being significant in helping people find new jobs.

Newspaper Websites Growing
While newspapers as we've known them are on the decline, their online versions are actually on the rise. According to a comScore and Newspaper Association of America report, more Americans spent more time on newspaper websites in 2011 than they did in 2010. The traffic growth is up 15% while time on sites are up 14%. News is certainly not dead...but the newspaper as it always has been probably is.

Almost Half of American Adults Have Smartphones
In a sign of the mobile times, a new Nielsen report shows that 48% of adult Americans now own a smartphone. This is up from 44% in mid-2011. Knowing that people are browsing mobile sites from home and on the go, it's clear that every business should have a mobile web plan as part of its Internet strategy.

We've all heard of a wedding singer. Now we can watch the wedding drummer...and in this particular case it happens to be the bride herself! Turns out she's a professional drummer and the groom is a professional musician as well. You definitely don't see this at most weddings...but if all brides were as good on the drums as her I'm sure we'd see it much more often. 

A few weeks ago I was talking with Jeremy Scott from Viral Orchard (and ReelSEO) and he used the phrase "viral catnip" to describe some of the elements that seem to help online videos gain an audience. I couldn't get that phrase out of my head. Could it be that there's a science behind what appears to be random lightning strikes? Are there really common elements that could be specifically and strategically applied to a video to increase the popularity of the videos? I hadn't really thought about it from that aspect before.

Later that day I emailed Jeremy with a list of several elements I've observed from popular online videos to see if he thought they were "viral catnip" and he agreed with my list and added some more of his own. Our list (so far) of elements that viral videos seem to contain are: 

1. Cats, of course, and other animals too
2. Beautiful people (especially women)
3. Cute kids (especially babies)
4. Celebrities
5. Creative spin on popular music
6. Crazy stunts
7. Random acts in public
8. Massive efforts (stop motion video, big art projects, flash mobs)
9. Camera tricks (slow motion, time-lapse)
10. Pop culture references (Star Wars, iPhone, Super Mario)
11. Fail videos
12. Shock or total surprises
    

I think it's worth noting that shooting a video with one or more of the elements above certainly doesn't guarantee success. In fact, don't go into any video project thinking it's going to go viral. You have no control over that. Seek to create a great video that's worthy of attention, communicates the things you want, and is interesting enough for someone to share and pass along to friends. If you do that you win. If it goes viral that's bonus.  

How I'm Using This List
I'm personally using this list for brainstorming meetings when I'm working with clients to develop new video concepts. At the end of the day you want to earn attention with video that people want to watch. The twelve elements from the list above have, at the very least, very much proven themselves worthy of earning attention many times over and that's worth considering. 

If you want to dig into this further, Jeremy wrote an ebook called The Social Video Blueprint: A Marketer's Guide To Social Video Success and it's available for a free download on ReelSEO.com.

Valentine's Day last week drove a lot of search traffic to restaurant websites and flower shops but most interesting was that mobile search for restaurants accounted for 62% of all US chain restaurant searches on Valentine's Day according to Google's own report. As you can see in the chart, mobile search spiked well above desktop and tablet searches.

In other mobile news, mobile video is still growing like crazy. Cisco recently announced that mobile video traffic accounted for 52% of all mobile traffic in 2011. The numbers seem to be growing as well. As more smartphone devices are getting into more hands, the public's desire for video when they're away from their computers is continuing to trend heavily upward.

Facebook's Timeline is now proving to be a good source of generating traffic for companies who have created apps for the timeline. According to a Facebook, many companies who have these apps integrated with Timeline are seeing significant increases in sign-ups and website traffic. The amount of traffic increase seems to range from 20% to 60% depending on the company.

I guess this self-leveling pool table is for those people who just have to play billiards regardless of the weather outside of the ship. Seems like the only missing here is a self-leveling floor but you gotta admit it's pretty interesting to watch.

 

You almost can't escape Pinterest talk these days. New stats about the site's staggering growth are coming out weekly. Last week comScore released new stats about Pinterest's growth showing that they've officially reached the much coveted "hockey stick moment" when growth begins to happen rapidly and exponentially. The team at Techcruch is calling it "hair dryer growth" since 18-34 year old women are propelling the growth. Whatever the case it appears Pinterest has reached 10 million unique visitors a month faster than any other independent website. Not bad for a two year old website.

Recent stats about tablets show that Apple is holding steady at 88% of all tablet-related website traffic. For all the devices on the market, if someone's coming to your website from a tablet you can almost guarantee that it's from an iPad.

Speaking of dominance, YouTube is still king in online video. In October, 2011 there were 88 billion videos viewed on YouTube. Equally interesting is that the same study showed that the average American Internet user watches 286 online videos per month.

Just about a year ago we had a snow storm blow through Nashville. Nashville drivers are notorious for freaking out with snow but traffic gets infinitely worse when the snow storms begin during a work day and everyone trys to get head out of town before it gets worse...which, ironically, only makes traffic even more terrible. 

My friend Ray works downtown and was quite aware of this inconvenient truth so he decided to "encouage" motorists who were attempting to escape the city before getting stuck in traffic, but as you can see, that didn't work out too well for them. Here's Ray's not so subtle approach to encouraging Nashville motorists a year ago. 

A few years ago I wrote a post about why it's bad form to retweet compliments on Twitter and as more people have gotten on Twitter since that time (and many have fallen into this same bit of Twitter malpractice) I thought it was time to repost the original idea.

The bottom line is this: retweeting a compliment is an online version of something you wouldn't dare think of doing in real life so why should it be considered acceptable online?

Here's the original post. Enjoy...and if you compliment me on it I'll certainly say thanks but I won't retweet it.

Post from June, 2009:

I've noticed an unfortunate trend among some people on Twitter. They retweet compliments, as in someone Tweets something nice about them and they in turn RT (retweet) that person's original complimentary tweet.

It looks like this:

First, Joe_Niceguy tweets:
@Bill_Needslove sure did a great job on that project for us. He's the man!

Then a few minutes later Bill_Needslove tweets:
RT @Joe_Niceguy: @Bill_Needslove sure did a great job on that project for us. He's the man!

Who thinks this is a good idea?

We don't do this offline. It's not as if you meet someone in the store and the first thing you say is, "Joe says my company is awesome. He thinks we're a great value and have first rate customer service." You wouldn't do that face-to-face, so why would you do it on Twitter? That just doesn't make sense.

If someone says something nice about you on Twitter just thank them and trust that people will see it. When you retweet a compliment it undermines the sentiment entirely. Just say thanks and move along.

There's no shortage of Pinterest related news these days it seems. Last week the volume of chatter about Pinterest skyrocketed when a Sharaholic report revealed that it drove more traffic to websites in the month of January than Google+ and was on par with Twitter. Pinterest also got some good press about driving traffic specifically to retail sites. 

While Pinterest is clearly up, blogging, it seems, is down...at least according to this report about Inc. 500 companies. The report claims that 50% of these companies were blogging in 2010 but only 37% of the same companies were blogging in 2011. Personally, I think blogging is still valuable but it's certainly the hardest of all the social mediums. Mitch Joel had a great take on this very Inc. 500 report that's worth the read. 

This Pew Research study shows that 52% of Americans use a cell phone while they're in a store shopping specifically for help with their shopping. According to this study:

"Specifically, 38% used their phone to call a friend for advice while in a store, 24% looked up product reviews online in-store, and one-quarter checked pricing online to see if they could get a better deal elsewhere.

"Furthermore, one in five “mobile price-matchers” made their most recent purchase from an online store rather than a physical location. More than one-third (37%) decided not to buy the product at all, 35% bought it at that store and 8% got it at another store."

Old Spice continues to make great, though wacky and bizarre, ads that are viral video gems. What's interesting now is that they're cross-promoting various Proctor & Gamble products with Old Spice. As you'll see in this video, what appears to be a fairly normal ad for an actual new product from Bounce, is also a quite funny Old Spice ad. 

 

The bait and switch never pays off (although Lucy from Charlie Brown might disagree.) Just when I thought I was getting good at avoiding them I totally fell right into a multi-level marketing (MLM) bait and switch. I thought a guy was asking for advice but he just wanted me to watch a video about some vacation-based MLM thing he's part of. Pretty sneaky taking advantage of someone who thinks they're doing you a favor.

It's A Dumb Strategy
A bait and switch is a dumb idea if you think about it. It's just delaying the inevitable response. If I wasn't going to like your vacation video before I'm definitely not going to like once you tricked me into watching it. Or, if your product wasn't as good as you claimed, I'm going to be even more upset when it breaks because of the very claim you made in the first place. 

The thing about a bait and switch is that it destroys trust. MLM's are notorious for this but companies from well regarded industries do this too.

Getting people interested in something legitimately is what advertising and marketing are all about. That's bait. It's the switch that happens when the individual or the company knows their bait is a fake. That's the whole problem. That's the lie.

Why It's A Bad Idea
The funny thing is there couldn't be a worse time to be someone who does a bait and switch. People are more connected now more than ever. If a company does this thousands of people could potentially call them out on it on Facebook. If a person does a bait and switch on me I can write an entire blog post about it...and decide whether or not I want to name names.

Social media has empowered people to shine light in previously dark areas. Bait and switch tactics will fail faster than ever because of this. That's one reason not to do it. The other reason is because if your character and reputation are important to you in the least, you won't do it. I may have taken the bait, but I also switched what I think about you.