Earlier this summer, there were several reports that Dell has made $3M thanks to its use of Twitter, mainly to notify people about outlet deals on dell.com. The microblogging service that garnered media attention with reports on things as trivial as celebrity feuds and as serious as protest of the Iranian election results also had a tangible dollar amount associated with its use. The Dell announcement also provided a benchmark of sorts for marketers looking to measure the monetary impact of their social media use.

But where does Dell stand when it comes to getting referral traffic from Twitter, relative to other sites that sell products to customers? To find out, I looked Compete’s referral analytics data, which shows us what site people went to right after they were on Twitter. Although this doesn’t include referrals from mobile devices or Twitter clients (e.g. Tweetdeck, Tweetie, and Twitterific), it does give us an idea of how traffic from the site is flowing to other parts of the web.

To do this analysis, I compared Dell.com to the sites that sell products to consumers online (let’s call them “selling sites”) that got the biggest percentage of referrals from twitter.com. I also looked at the percentage of each site’s overall traffic that was made up of referrals from twitter.com, to gauge how big of an impact the microblogging site was having for them in the grand scheme of things.

The data is shown in the chart below. Each site’s rank in terms of getting referral traffic from Twitter’s website is in brackets, which you would read as “across all sites on the web, eBay ranked 15th in getting share of referral traffic from twitter.com.” The bars show the percentage of each site’s referral traffic that comes from Twitter referrals, which you would read as, “a tenth of one percent of craigslist’s referral traffic is made up of referrals from twitter.com.”

A couple of interesting points to note here:

• Among these selling sites, eBay is getting the largest percentage of the referral traffic from Twitter.com, even though those referrals make up about the same proportion of eBay.com’s overall traffic as they do for Dell’s site
• Etsy, a site where people can sell handmade and vintage items, saw the largest percentage of their traffic from Twitter.com in this group, at just over 2%
• In terms of getting Twitter referral share, Dell ranks 205th, and only about 0.1% of its site traffic comes from twitter.com

What does this mean? A couple of implications come to mind.

First, there is still an opportunity for these selling sites to increase their traffic from Twitter.com to make up a larger portion of their traffic, and take advantage of Twitter’s strength of delivering simple information quickly to a designated audience.

Second, a little seems to go a long way. Dell was able to make money using Twitter without garnering a large percentage of twitter.com referral traffic, and without a big chunk of their overall traffic coming from Twitter. Again, this data doesn’t include traffic that came from Twitter clients or mobile devices, but it does give us an insight into the traffic patterns from the website.

Third, a couple of the sites ahead of Dell in this analysis are places where people can buy, but also post their own items. It could be that people are using Twitter to promote what they are personally trying to sell. Although sites like Dell probably won’t (and shouldn’t) enable the average person to sell on its site, encouraging the audience’s participation through retweets could help boost traffic.

Twitter may be enigmatic, but it has potential for marketers. Typing 140 characters isn’t hard, but figuring out how much, and how to tap into it, is the true challenge.

On July 15, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will finally hit theaters. It’s been a two year wait for fans who last saw a film based on J.K. Rowling’s popular book series in July 2007, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

So far, I haven’t seen the same frenzy around all things Potter as I did two years ago, when anticipation around the new movie and the release of the final book in the series was everywhere. Will this movie be as big as the last one, or is the momentum low going into this release?

To gauge this, I looked at two aspects of consumers’ online behavior. First, I used compete.com to find out where people have been going when they search for Harry Potter information online in the last few months. Second, I looked at traffic to a few key sites around the releases of both Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince.

Let’s start with the search data. The chart below shows the top 10 sites that people were directed to after going to a major search engine and looking up a term that included the keywords “harry potter” in the three month period between April 1st and June 30th 2009. The sites are ranked by the percentage of all traffic generated by searches including the keyword “harry potter” that went to a particular site, shown with the blue bars.

Visits to these sites made up about 40% of the search referred traffic. What does this tell us about the audience?

• Many searchers end in a visit to the studio’s site. Warner Brothers, the studio releasing the movie, got the largest share of the search referred traffic, around 11%. Harry Potter searches made up about 17% of WB site’s search traffic in this period.
• After Warner Brothers, social media and user generated content sites show up frequently in the top 10. In this subgroup, we’re also seeing a mix of mainstream sites (Wikipedia, IMDb, YouTube, Facebook), as well as fan sites, like mugglenet, wikia and fanfiction.net.

Given these results, I decided to look at a few of these sites in more detail to get a feel for interest in the new film: the studio sites, Mugglenet (a popular Potter fan site), YouTube searches that included the words “Harry Potter,” and Harry Potter pages on Wikipedia, as shown in the chart below.

*Note: Official studio sites include all of harrypotter.warnerbros.com, which includes all of the movies in the series, and harrypotterorderofthepheonix.com, the microsite advertised with the Order of the Phoenix.

Here we can see that, in terms of overall interest, the marketing around a movie does seem to give all of the sites a lift, with the biggest change in traffic coming around a new theatrical release.

But is Pottermania as strong online now as it was two years ago? If we compare traffic to these sites, in June 2007 (the month before Order of the Phoenix was released) and June 2009 (the month before Half Blood Prince will be released), the indicators are mixed. Aggregate traffic to these four sites is down slightly, but people are also using different sources of information online. The studio site, where we saw most of the searchers visiting, saw a 29% decrease in traffic in June ’09 compared to June ’07. However, the number of people searching for terms including “Harry Potter” on YouTube has jumped up 91%, from about 200K in June 2007 to 400K in June 2009.

So what does this mean for Half Blood Prince? It doesn’t have quite the same online boost that its predecessor did, probably due in part to the fact that there’s no new book launch this year. Still, despite that and delays in the theatrical release date, it looks like it’s poised to draw in a good audience. We’ll find out how well on July 15th.

On Saturday, Palm released the Pre, the latest in a long line of potential iPhone killers. While the iPhone was not the first device to offer a touchscreen, its popularity has made the technology more common on major release Smartphones.

Many factors have an impact on consumer choice, particularly when buying something as complex as a mobile phone; price, network coverage, carrier, applications, and many others. But what about touchscreens? How interested are consumers in touchscreens versus a more traditional QWERTY keyboard? Touchscreens create a lot of interest, but are they top of mind for the average mobile phone shopper when they’re ready to buy?

This chart covers share of online interest in phones with a physical QWERTY keyboard or touchscreen on the “Big 4” carriers’ sites during the first quarter. Each bar represents one week.

Our data show that in the first quarter of 2009, touchscreens and QWERTY keyboards weighed in almost equally when it came to online interest. We’re also seeing that:

• Share of interest is trending upward for both features overall this quarter, although touchscreens have experienced a more consistent upward trend
• Share of interest in QWERTY phones averaged 37% and touchscreen phones 35% this quarter

But, according to our Q1 survey data, when it comes down to the purchase decision, touchscreens are not as important – at least not yet.

QWERTY keys were “important” or “very important” to 44% of those surveyed, while 37% said the same about touchscreens. We can see in the chart above, however, that 23% of respondents said that QWERTY keys were “very important”, compared to just 15% for touchscreens.

It’s not that touchscreens aren’t desirable for consumers – wireless shoppers on the web are clearly looking at phones with this feature, as we saw above. Still, they aren’t quite as influential as QWERTY keys when it comes to picking a specific phone to buy. Interest in these features and in Smartphones generally has been increasing.

It’s also important to note that while the data in the second chart shows us that QWERTY keys and touchscreens were important for 44% and 37% of shoppers, the corollary is that they weren’t important to 56% and 63%, respectively, when it came to their purchase decision.

So, even though a lot of the hype on advanced Smartphones is about touchscreens, QWERTY keyboards are actually a more important factor for most people when it comes to the purchase decision. Still, the majority of consumers don’t think either feature is important to their purchase decision.

In this tough economy where people are looking for value, the challenge for device manufacturers and carriers remains convincing consumers why these features are must haves for every wireless shopper, not just the early adopters.

Depending on your vantage point, a netbook might look like a small laptop or a large Smartphone.

The dual nature of the netbook may be marking a period of increasing convergence between computers and wireless phones. Companies that traditionally make computers are manufacturing netbooks and beginning to plan or consider moves into the Smartphone market. Wireless carriers are beginning to sell discounted netbooks tied to wireless broadband contracts. AT&T is now selling the devices in some of its stores and through RadioShack, while a Verizon Wireless rep recently confirmed rumors that they would offer a similar deal in the future.

Changes may be brewing in the consumer electronics and wireless industries, but when consumers searched for netbooks online in early 2009, where did they go? To find out, I looked at search data from compete.com.

This chart shows the top 10 sites that people were directed to after going to a major search engine and looking up a term that included the keyword ‘netbook.’ The sites are ranked by the percentage of all traffic generated by searches including the keyword ‘netbook’ that went to a particular site. What’s interesting here?

• Third party review and information sites have a strong presence in the top 10, including CNet, Wikipedia, Engadget, and the netbook-focused liliputing.com.
• Big brands’ sites are not as prevalent as they are for searches on ‘laptops’ where Dell and HP are the #1 and #3 destinations. Other netbook manufacturers like Asus and Acer don’t appear in the top 10 sites by keyword share for terms including ‘netbook.’
• Few retailers and no carriers appear in the top 10.

So these ‘netbook’ searchers are going to retail and manufacturer sites, but many are visiting third party review sites, blogs and information sites like Wikipedia to learn more about the devices, likely because heavy marketing and media reports on netbooks are a relatively recent phenomenon.

These data also suggest that there is opportunity here for big brands to have more of a presence when it comes to keyword share. Dell’s relative strength in this area compared to other big brands is likely due, at least in part, to strong marketing in early 2009 around its Inspiron Mini line, featuring it prominently in some promotions around their Presidents’ Day sales.

As new players enter the market, beef up their marketing campaigns, receive more press coverage, and step up their search marketing, we’re likely to see some changes in where these searchers land online. Will they gravitate to manufacturer sites? Carriers? Third party reviews? Stay tuned.

The Smartphone market is an increasingly crowded place. After Apple’s success with the iPhone from 2007 onward, more companies, from GPS manufacturer Garmin to PC manufacturers like Acer and Asustek, are throwing their hats in the ring.

In January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), wireless industry pioneer Palm announced that they were launching a new Smartphone, called the Pre (pronounced like “tree”). Since then, we’ve heard relatively little about the Pre, beyond the occasional launch rumor, and the sporadic report suggesting both Sprint and Palm have a lot riding on the success of this device.

Still, despite a weak economy, no solid release date, little advertising, and a crowded Smartphone marketplace, it doesn’t seem like the Pre has faded from consumers’ minds. Traffic on just the informational pages on Sprint.com and Palm.com since CES suggest that a lot of people are curious about the Pre.

• Unique visitors to Pre information pages on the manufacturer and/or carrier site(s) alone have been hovering around the 100,000 mark for the last seven weeks.
• Interest in the device around CES (week of January 4th) was high: nearly 400,000 people checked out one or both of these pages.
• A median of about 1.6x more visitors have visited Palm’s site over Sprint’s so far for information about the device. This may be in part because the Pre information pages on Palm’s site are more robust at the moment, including pictures of the Pre’s functions, as well as video.

This traffic is all despite the fact that neither Palm nor Sprint has consistently featured the Pre in a prominent way on their site since the announcement. For example, as of Tuesday afternoon, although there was a front page link on the Palm site, it was far below a feature for the Treo Pro, which launched this week, and the Pre was not mentioned on the Sprint.com homepage.

To gauge consumer interest in the Pre relative to other Smartphones, the original iPhone is perhaps the best example. Like the Pre, the iPhone was announced well before it was launched. When we look at interest in the original iPhone on Apple.com and AT&T’s website around the same time in 2007, we see different numbers, but a very similar pattern.

A few similarities between the two charts stand out.

First, in the case of the iPhone, the majority of the traffic throughout the period shown was also going to the manufacturer, Apple.com. In fact , AT&T didn’t have information about the iPhone on their site in the first week shown on the chart.

Second, although the numbers were higher for the iPhone than the Pre, the Pre’s numbers are fairly strong in comparison, especially when you factor in how much buzz surrounded Apple’s first foray into a Smartphone market that was much less crowded in early 2007. Online interest the week that the iPhone was announced resulted in 600,000 visitors to the information on Apple.com, about 50% more than the aggregate traffic we saw to the Pre on Sprint.com and Palm.com.

Although we don’t know yet how strong Pre sales will be, and eclipsing the phenomenal popularity of the iPhone would be a difficult task at best, it looks like the Pre may be positioned to have a fighting chance in a very challenging marketplace.

The application store rush is definitely on. Since the success of the iPhone’s App Store, Nokia, the Google Android Market, and the Microsoft Skymarket have all followed suit. Even PC manufacturer Acer has said they are looking into the viability of an application store for their new line of Smartphones.

News that Blackberry was planning an application store of some kind has been circulating for a while now, but few details were available. As an avid Blackberry user, I’ve been looking forward to App World for some time. Applications have been featured on blackberry.com for a while, but on nowhere near the scale of the iPhone App Store. There are other sites where you can find both paid and free applications, but no centralized place to go.

In the first week of March, I got an email from the manufacturer announcing that Blackberry App World was coming, inviting me to sign up to get updates. There are even some “App World” pages up on the site now, but no evidence when I visited the site of a big impending launch. Intrigued, I decided to investigate how popular the Blackberry site is today and if it is actually a destination for people looking for applications to add to their devices.

Blackberry.com has become an increasingly popular site in the last 12 months, with traffic growing more than 140% and visits per person increasing by 16% year over year.

People are heading to Blackberry.com in large numbers; most wireless device manufacturer sites have been getting fewer than a million each month. So, I took a look at the site to see what information about App World is actually available now. Of course, it hasn’t been officially launched yet, but there is actually some information about what it is and developing applications on the site. However, this is not easy to find: you have to click on “Software” and then on the “Blackberry App World” menu item, which isn’t highlighted and appears below a link to “Applications for Blackberry Smartphones”.

Even if you were one of those people who, like me, signed up for updates and got the email (pictured below), the call to action was clear, but you had to scroll to the bottom of the message to get to the registration link, in contrast to the large button used on the same graphic on their website.

The prospects for App World also look pretty good because the manufacturer’s site already seems to be the destination of choice for many people searching the web for apps. Looking at search data on where people who typed “Blackberry application” into one of the major search engines, it turns out that about a fifth of them are already heading to Blackberry.com.

Considering the number of people who are already going to Blackberry.com and their propensity to go to the site while in search of applications already, it’s likely that traffic to App World will increase in the coming months. In the meantime, I’ll still be searching far and wide on the web for new Blackberry applications.