Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Looks like the auto industry bailout talk is finally moving forward. People are getting ready for the holidays amid snowstorms not just up here in the more northern parts of the continent, but residents in Las Vegas woke up to snowy palms.

What's Been Happening This Week

On a Positive Note

Despite widespread economic gloom, not everything is going down the drain. Online metrics service Compete says the top online retailers in the US are doing quite well this holiday season, at least in terms of unique visitors. The most popular online shopping sites are significantly ahead of last year's performance.

Compete cites Amazon, which had about 460 million unique visitors during all of last holiday season, already surpassed that number around December 10th. And online electronics retailer Newegg.com has seen its traffic grow by almost 100%. But not everyone's doing as well. Some sites like Blockbuster.com and 123inkjets.com have seen their visitor numbers drop by up to 86% from last year. Like in any business, there are both winners and losers in online retailing.

Social Back Down to Reality, Mobile Soars

Even recently predictions for social media were relatively positive, but now realism is inspiring sober second thoughts in some as to the ROI of tools like Facebook.

While social media might be hitting the first awkward stages of puberty, mobile, for many, is the shiny new child, in the form of apps, services, coupons, messages and location tagging. More people in the US have a mobile phone than an Internet-connected PC. Mobile is now being touted as the only form of advertising that's largely recession-proof, as both mobile messaging service revenues and mobile ad impressions continue to soar. It's all relative, of course, as in North America this new medium has no place to go but up.

Karri Ojanen