Does the social media craze feel a bit like the dot-com 1.0 bubble of the 90s? Smells like it, tastes like it and this confusing graphic certainly adds visual credence to our theory. If nothing less, it makes being anti-social seem almost normal.
Digit Marketing Launches GiftCardPromotions.biz
Innovative Gift Card Incentive Program Features More Than 8,000 Products and 600 Brands Priced up To 90% off Face Value
(March 22, 2011) – Chicago, IL – Performance marketing agency Digit Marketing announced the launch of GiftCardPromotions.biz, which features a unique gift card program that provides incentive marketers access to thousands of name brand products for as little as ten cents on the dollar. The cards are sold primarily in $100 or $250 bundles that allow customers to redeem their gift cards in online stores that include gadgets, electronics, leather, jewelry, sunglasses, cookware, watches, tools and pro football apparel.
“We’re really excited to be selected as a distributor for this unique program, which gives marketers an incredible amount of financial leverage to create value for their offer without sacrificing on product quality or overcomplicating the customer experience,” remarked Mike Markin, President of Digit Marketing.
Digit Marketing is a preferred distributor of the cards, which are designed to provide a simple, easy and convenient means of incentivizing marketing offers for advertising and promotional campaigns, customer incentive programs, and retention and reward programs. In addition to the $100 and $250 card packs, a $25 Pro Football Jackets card and $50 jewelry card are also available.
Customers are able to shop for merchandise that is priced low enough for them to use their gift card credit to purchase products as well as cover shipping charges (UPS shipping rates), so there is no customer cost to redeem. There is merchandise available at prices higher than the gift card values, and customers can choose to use their credits toward the purchase of more expensive products, which include thousands of name brands in more than 50 categories at the different online storefronts.
Gift cards now represent 30% of the incentive market, and have become the preferred award choice for merchandise or service incentives. The program offered through GiftCardPromotions.biz is perfectly suited for a variety of business applications including services and subscriptions, lead generation, product purchase, trade show gifts, member sign ups, sporting events, referrals and recruiting. A video describing the program in more detail that be viewed at http://www.giftcardpromotions.biz/how-it-works/gift-card-promotions-video/
About Digit Marketing
Digit Marketing (www.digitmarketing.com) is an online performance marketing agency that blends online marketing strategies, tactics and metrics to help you maximize the return on your online investment. Whether you’re looking to grow traffic, increase conversions or retain more customers, we provide customized online marketing services that meet the needs of today’s internet marketer.
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Visualize Your LinkedIn Network with InMaps
Our ongoing quest to replace words with pictures in the Digit Marketing blog brings us to LinkedIn’s cool new data visualization tool called InMaps. The social network’s new adddition promises to help you understand the relationships between you and your connections, but to us its just another envy vehicle where people brag about the size of their dots and clusters. Do you often have questions for data scientists? Us too.
Skype Boasts 25 Million Concurrent Users
In advance of its upcoming IPO, Skype recently announced some usage numbers that are sure to whet the appetites of potential inventors and numbers geeks alike. In addition to the impressive milestone of 25 million concurrent users using the service at the same time, consider these equally impressive Skype numbers:
- In 2009, Skype users consumed 113 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes for voice, video and text messaging
- For the first six months of 2010, about 40% of Skype’s minutes were used for video
- In sum, Skype boasts more than 500 million users
- Revenue in 2009 was @ $600 million
- Company was valued at $2.75 billion when it was sold last September by eBay to a group of investors
Skype filed with the SEC this year for an IPO that experts say will raise as much as $100 million or more and make the VOIP giant one of the largest publicly traded internet companies.
Twittermoods: Visualizing Moody Americans with Twitter
When you can’t come up with enough words to power a blog post, there’s nothing like a captivating picture or a cool video. Thankfully, this past week a group of researchers from Northeastern and Harvard universities pulled together data from Twitter to present a visualization of how Americans feel throughout the day and the week. Crunching the numbers from 300 million tweets, a word list, U.S. Census Bureau data, Google Maps API and more, they came up with some insights and pretty colors representing where and when a Debbie Downer or Happy Harry mood sets in.
The study is called Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter, and here are the pretty colors you have been waiting for, which should put you on the way towards green/happy for at least a while…
Elmhurst, IL Loves Sex, Porn and XXX
That’s according to new research from Online MBA, which recently released a very interesting infographic that presents stunning statistics about online pornography. Aside from being entertaining, we are finally able to write a blog post that features some of the internet’s most popular keywords, such as “sex,” “adult dating,” and “porn.”
Via: Online MBA
Test Your Testing Knowledge
Which Test Won? is an interesting site profiling split A/B landing page testing, followed by a poll asking visitors which design they think outperformed the other. Before you conduct A/B testing through tools such as Google Website Optimzer, take a look at the past results, and jump on the magical mystery tour where online marketers try and figure out what makes people click.
Open Source Web Analytics: Piwik
Love Google Analytics? Wish you could have a similar piece of software hosted on your own server rather than sending your data to Google? Can we fit another question into this paragraph? Why not?
Piwik is a web analytics solution that comes with features we always seek in a solution – namely free and open source. They claim to be an an open source alternative to Google Analytics, and offer webmasters and web marketers an in-house alternative for websites that would rather not (or legally can’t) send their data to external analytics resources. You can check out the demo here.
An Interesting Look at Spam
A fascinating new chart by New Scientist portrays the short but annoying history of spam emails. It’s amazing that spam today makes up 80 to 90% of all emails sent – around 120 billion messages per day. It’s also a multi-billion dollar cat and mouse game between spammers and regulators. Who would have thought that you could make money on a 0.000008% conversion rate?
p.s. Digit Marketing neither condones nor participates in spam campaigns, but you have to admit it is an interesting post for the email marketing category.
Apple Ups and Google Doubles U.S. Mobile Marketshare
Data measurement company comScore, Inc. recently released a report looking at the U.S. mobile phone industry over the three month period between September and December 2009. According to the report, a total of 234 million people aged 13 and older used mobile devices in December 2009, with RIM topping the list of smartphone devices at 41.6 percent share of the market. Apple ranked second with 25.3 percent share (up 1.2 percentage points), followed by Microsoft with 18.0 percent share, Palm with 6.1 percent share, and Google with 5.2 percent share (doubling its share by upping to 2.7 percentage points).
| Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Months Ending Dec. 2009 vs. 3 Months Ending Sep. 2009 Total U.S. Age 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens |
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| Share (%) of Smartphone Devices | |||
| Sep-09 | Dec-09 | Point Change | |
| Total Smartphone Subscribers | 100.0% | 100.0% | N/A |
| RIM | 42.6% | 41.6% | -1.0 |
| Apple | 24.1% | 25.3% | 1.2 |
| Microsoft | 19.0% | 18.0% | -1.0 |
| Palm | 8.3% | 6.1% | -2.2 |
| 2.5% | 5.2% | 2.7 | |