With the unemployment rate at 10%, the stock market 30% below its peak from the fall of 2007 and companies continuing to announce layoffs, it can be hard to remain optimistic these days.  However, Oscar Mayer is trying to change that by bringing some cheer with its Good Mood Mission campaign, which is a charity program aimed at feeding the hungry.  Consumers are encouraged to go to their Good Mood Mission site to submit a “good mood” comment that starts with “it doesn’t get better than”.  For each good mood submitted, the company will donate a pound of food to Feeding America, a hunger relief charity organization.  I submitted a “good mood” myself and I did end up in a better mood just by thinking about the things that put me in a good mood.

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The Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study provides powerful insight into the complete online shopping experience. Please contact Matt Pace at mpace@compete.com or Debra Miller at dmiller@compete.com for more information.

According to a 2008 Rosetta study, in April of 2008, less than 1/3 of US e-retailers had a Facebook page.  By November 2008, that number had doubled.  Last quarter, Softpedia reported that 86 percent of US online retailers have a Facebook page, and they expect that number to reach 99 percent soon.  With the vast majority of online retailers flocking to Facebook and other social media sites, the question I have to ask is: are consumers paying attention?

According to the Q3 Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study, consumers have been slow to embrace social media as a shopping resource.  Social networking sites were ranked as the least used online shopping resource; 60 percent of all consumers surveyed said that they do not use social networking sites while shopping online.  When questioned further, an even larger percentage said that they never visit retailer pages on Facebook or follow retailers on Twitter.

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So, BC, or Before Compete, I worked for a large Media company in their Distribution Group. Therefore, I was not overly surprised when I received a News alert on New Year’s Day telling me “Scripps Networks Pulls Channels from Cablevision Systems.”

Surely, however, the 3+ million New York, New Jersey and Connecticut Cablevision subscribers were much more surprised when they tried to turn on the popular Scripps Networks—Food Network and HGTV—New Year’s Day to a message telling them the content was no longer available.  What is particularly interesting to me is the way both Cablevision and Scripps took to the web to garner support from their customer base as we’ll see below.  To reference an old saying, “Customers just want their…Food Network and HGTV…back.”

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Because many of our Ad Impact clients ask “How does Compete see ads?” or “What is it you see?” we decided to answer those questions in this forum with a peek “under the hood.”  The “hood” in this case isn’t the one covering our servers or software or algorithms, but the one that covers the big, brilliant Internet itself.

If you’re not 100% confident in your understanding of how Web pages “work,” any site will provide a quick lesson and illustrate what Compete “sees.”  Let’s say you visit LinkedIn to check up on a recent business contact.  From your perspective, you might type “linkedin.com” into the browser’s address bar, and the page appears in a few seconds.  Then you sign in and click ‘submit.’  What you see next would look (something) like this:

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Those of us that spend hours, minutes, or even seconds a day online are almost certainly familiar with at least one social networking site and the volume of word-of-mouth marketing that occurs on them.  Social Networking sites are bucking the label of “just a fad” by continuing to grow at high rates.  According to Compete.com, Facebook is the #3 site on the web (behind Google.com and Yahoo.com), with 202% growth Y-O-Y and Twitter is the #39 site on the web, with 660% growth Y-O-Y.

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The Death of Newspapers or the Rise of Reddit?

TechCrunch recently pointed out that “Google’s Got Some Suggestions” about what Newspapers are:

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