Shaw & Todd - Advertising and Marketing Communications

Since such an enormous amount of us are using social media in some way, shape or form, it’s natural for us communicators to try to figure out how to leverage/use social media in our marketing efforts. I’ve been to seminars, client meetings, and networking events where this very subject has been discussed and discussed and discussed and discussed (you see what I’m getting at). For those of us marketing to scientists, we couldn’t have been happier when Bioinformatics and PJA posted the results of their survey: “The New Collaboration: Social Media and the Life Science Opportunity.”

Kudos to those involved with the study. While there’s nothing earth-shattering about the findings, we need data like this to pore over. So before I lead you to the report, I do want to offer a quick comment on the top answer to the question: “In which social networking sites do you currently participate on a professional basis?” Number one answer: The Science Advisory Board, by an enormous margin (69% to 2nd place finisher Nature Network’s 24%). Huh? Here’s why: over half the survey participants were registered members, and most likely active participants, of the SAB. So maybe that result is a bit skewed. I can accept that. Otherwise, there’s some great info in there, and therefore a must-read for anyone currently marketing to the life scientist.

Check out the study here.

I recently conducted an poll among friends looking to gauge their search engine habits (I know what you’re thinking, “Stay away from this guy at parties.”). I asked each person which search engine they typically use and to then take a guess at what percentage of U.S. searches went through Google. The results of the first question went as expected: an overwhelming majority use Google, while a select few search via their My Yahoo! page or Yahoo! toolbar. The answers to the second question ran the gamut: some thought that Google owned as many of 95% of all searches, while others pegged it somewhere around 65-70%. It was clear that everyone was confident of Google’s place as the search market leader, but to what degree there wasn’t a consensus.

Now for the actual stats. The numbers vary a bit depending on the source, but it appears Google’s search dominance in the U.S. falls within the 60-67% range. This shocked the more than a few that guessed it was somewhere around 90%. Ok, maybe shocked is a bit too strong of a word, but it did surprise them. Yahoo!’s share hovers around 20% according to the tracking source Hitwise. MSN (7%) and Ask (4%) come in a distant 3rd and 4th.

So the moral of this blog entry is this: for those of us who utilize pay-per-search as an advertising tool, it’s good to be reminded of Yahoo!’s search engine marketshare. If you currently are “Google Adwording” then you should definitely also advertise on Yahoo!’s paid search services.

(inside reference of the day: let’s not forget about eZanga, or boy will you be sorry)

As a marketing professional, I couldn’t be more thrilled at the abundance of metrics and analytics that the Internet makes available. Here’s a confession: I’ve always been addicted to statistics. Guess that’s what happens when one is exposed to the Baseball Encyclopedia at the age of six. So now I have a new outlet: website traffic tracking sites. There are bunch of them out there– perhaps the best known (and the one I most often use) is Alexa. A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Alexa basically lets you view any site’s traffic statistics, ranking, and perhaps best of all, provides you with the ability to compare the traffic results of multiple sites. It also gives you comprehensive lists of the top sites in multiple categories. Check out the top 500 visited sites or drill down to an area as specific as the most popular online scientific publications. Some doubt the absolute reliability of these results, which is definitely a caveat, but for the pure volume of analytical data that it delivers, Alexa is truly a fountain of information. Actually, more like an ocean.