Apple’s [AAPL  286.091    -2.849  (-0.99%)    ] iPad sold three million units in the first 80 days after its April release and its current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter, according to Bernstein Research. This sales rate is blowing past the one million units the iPhone sold in its first quarter and the 350,000 units sold in the first year by the DVD player, the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product. “The iPad did not seem destined to be a runaway product success straight out of the box,” said Colin McGranahan, retail analyst at Bernstein Research, in a note. “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion.”

At this current rate, the iPad will pass gaming hardware and the cellular phone to become the 4th biggest consumer electronics category with estimated sales of more than $9 billion in the U.S. next year, according to Bernstein. TVs, smart phones and notebook PCs are the current three largest categories.

“This is much bigger than I thought it would be,” said Pete Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster.com and a ‘Fast Money’ trader. “It’s really a total media device and there’s not much a PC can do that you can’t do on an iPad.”

To be fair to the DVD, they were a bulky, pricey change from video recorders that had become a staple of most American homes. It took five years for the DVD to reach the unit sales pace that the iPad reached in just its first quarter, according to Bernstein. The iPad had the advantage of being the extension of Apple’s ever-expanding ecosystem of iPhones, iPod touches and Macs that are marked by ease of use and a familiar style.

Bernstein’s McGranahan covers Best Buy [BBY  40.76    -0.12  (-0.29%)   ], the first major retailer to sell the iPad. His analysis found that not only are the iPads cannibalizing the netbook/notebook category in stores, but could also be hurting sales of TVs and digital cameras.

“It is the rare American household that would spend $600-plus dollars on an iPad and buy a TV or a PC or a digital camera in the same month, or the same quarter, or maybe even the same year,” said McGranahan. The cannibalization of computers by tablets is one of the reasons Goldman Sachs downgraded Microsoft [MSFT  24.19    -0.16  (-0.66%)   ], sending the shares to the worst performance of any Dow Jones Average [.DJIA  10931.74    -12.98  (-0.12%)   ] member today. “The company needs a credible iPad answer in the near term to allay concerns that tablet proliferation necessarily cannibalizes Windows sales,” wrote Goldman analyst Sarah Friar in a note. “To compete with Apple, and Google [GOOG  530.7136    -7.5164  (-1.4%)   ] through Android and Chrome, Microsoft would likely benefit from collaborating with hardware manufacturers on an instant-on, always connected device that has longer-than-PC- battery life and a vibrant ecosystem of applications.” Apple has been the rare company that keeps the “first mover” advantage. As tablets from Microsoft and Research-In-Motion soon flood the market, and Apple’s market capitalization approaches Exxon Mobil, the company’s going to need the next big extension of that ecosystem. Apple TV is on sale now.

By: John Melloy
Executive Producer, Fast Money

(Bloomberg) Facebook Inc.’s biggest advertisers have boosted spending by at least 10-fold in the past year as the social network crossed the half- billion user mark, becoming more alluring to marketers that want to reach a broad online audience.

Some advertisers have increased spending by as much as 20-fold or more, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview. The site’s ad prices have held steady even as user growth fueled a surge in inventory, or pages that can carry ads, she said. “Two years ago the big brands were experimenting with us,” said Sandberg, 40, declining to identify which customers were spending more. “They started buying with us a year ago. Now, they’re going big.” As a closely held company, Facebook doesn’t disclose revenue figures.

Facebook is courting advertisers and ramping up the pace of acquisitions to wring profit from its more than 500 million users, who don’t pay to use the site. The owner of the world’s largest social network may put off an initial public offering until 2012 to give Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg more time to add sales and lure users, people familiar with the matter said last week.The company plans to make more purchases to help it build features to keep users glued to its pages -- and the ads that run on them -- longer. While Facebook has mainly focused on startups with smaller staffs, it may start pursuing bigger transactions, said Vaughan Smith, director of corporate development.

Bigger Deals

“As we get bigger and our platform gets more stable, I fully expect that we will be doing more significant acquisitions,” Smith, 43, said in an interview. “This is working for us, and it’s working for the people that we’re acquiring.” Founded in 2004 by Zuckerberg in a Harvard University dormitory room, Facebook lets users share photos, video, short messages and other information with groups of friends. After surpassing News Corp.’s MySpace as the world’s biggest social network in 2008, Facebook nudged aside AOL Inc. to become the fourth-most visited site in the U.S. last year, according to ComScore Inc. Only Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are bigger. Facebook’s sales may rise to at least $1.4 billion in 2010 from $700 million to $800 million last year, two people familiar with the matter said last week.

‘The Reach’

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, gets much if not most of its revenue from advertising. Its customers include Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Adidas AG. “You can’t ignore the reach that’s there, but it’s also the true engagement that we have,” said Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola’s director of global interactive marketing. Facebook’s future growth will hinge partly on whether it can overcome privacy concerns and stave off a threat by rivals including Twitter Inc. Consumer groups and lawmakers have alleged that Facebook doesn’t do enough to protect the personal information people add to their profiles. “Facebook’s value is being able to preserve that user base,” said Michael Gartenberg, a partner at researcher Altimeter Group in San Mateo, California. “Those 500 million users -- advertisers not only want to make sure that those people aren’t churning and that they’re actually using their accounts, but that there’s growth here as well.”

Advertisers ‘Dig In’

To make marketing messages more appealing to marketers and less intrusive to users, Facebook has incorporated social elements. Below an ad, users can see which of their friends may be fans of the advertiser, for example.“Some clients have actually been pretty active on Facebook for a while, but we’re finding a number of clients that are starting to dig in a little bit more,” said Joe Mele, a managing director at Publicis Groupe SA’s Razorfish agency. “We’re seeing increased interest.” With each new user, Facebook gets more pages on which to place ads, resulting in an inventory surge. Yet prices for ads based on the number of times they are viewed have held steady in the past year, Sandberg said. The prices of the social ads may rise as Facebook brings more “value” to companies, she said. “A movie studio last year that did three movies with us -- this year, if they’re releasing 12 movies, they’ll do 10 of them with us,” Sandberg said. “A company that did one product launch with us -- this year they’re going to do half of their product launches.”

Display Leader

Also buoying ad prices, about half of Facebook users return to the site daily, the company says. That makes the users valuable to advertisers that want messages viewed multiple times. Much of Facebook’s ad growth comes from so-called display ads, graphic messages that usually appear as boxes on Web pages, rather than the search-related ads that are Google’s mainstay. Facebook displaced Yahoo as the top U.S. site for display ads, with 16 percent share in the first quarter, up from 11 percent in the fourth quarter, according to ComScore in Reston, Virginia. Spending on display advertising is expected to rise 13 percent to $8.56 billion in the U.S. this year, after a 4.5 percent gain in 2009, according to EMarketer Inc. To chase that growth, Facebook is relying on dealmaking. It has made five acquisitions so far this year after one apiece in 2009 and 2007, Smith said.

Another Dealmaker

The company buys small startups -- typically with a dozen or fewer employees -- to gain entrepreneurs who can become future leaders, Smith said. Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor came from FriendFeed, acquired last year.Facebook will keep up the acquisition pace and may pursue larger, more complex transactions, Smith said. He plans to hire another corporate development executive, adding to the one person helping him clinch deals now. The company doubled the number of salespeople last year from 2008. It now has more than 1,400 employees. Among potential targets are companies that focus on virtual currencies and mobile social networking, Smith said. The company also is looking for acquisitions that may bolster its advertising effort, he said. We’re doing advertising, especially brand advertising, in a different way than has been done before,” he said.

Marketers fall into one of two categories:

A few benefit when they make their customers smarter. The more the people they sell to know, the more informed, inquisitive, free-thinking and alert they are, the better they do.

And most benefit when they work to make their customers dumber. The less they know about options, the easier they are to manipulate, the more helpless they are, the better they do.

Tim O'Reilly doesn't sell books. He sells smarts. The smarter the world gets, the better he does.

The vast majority of marketers, though, take the opposite tack. Ask them for advice about their competitors, they turn away and say "I really wouldn''t know." Ask them for details about their suppliers, and they don't want to tell you. Ask them to show you a recipe for how to make what they make on your own, and "it's a trade secret." Their perfect customer is someone in a hurry, with plenty of money and not a lot of knowledge about their options.

You've already guessed the punchline--if just one player enters the field and works to make people smarter, the competition has a hard time responding with a dumbness offensive. They can obfuscate and run confusing ads, but sooner or later, the inevitability of information spreading works in favor of those that bet on it.

via @ Seth Godin

The brands that have enjoyed the most success using social media to drive consumers toward purchases follow one of two paths: Either they offer coupons or discounts, or they position themselves in front of consumers during sales or other special events, according to eMarketer. One-quarter of respondents to a survey conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey said that coupons and discounts were the primary reason they became fans of a brand on Facebook. An additional 21 percent said it was because they were already customers. Another survey, by Morpace, found that 37 percent of Facebook users joined fan pages because they wanted to get coupons and discounts.

"Coupons remain a leading driver of brand interactions in social networks," said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson. "At the same time, they can be one of the trickiest social media tactics to pull off. The discount offer must print or download easily and must work as promised. And the retail store or distribution channel must be prepared for demand."

Declare Your Arrival

No pomp and show; just a one-page press release is enough to create a stir in the web world. Such a release helps you get in-bound links for search engine optimization; makes the market aware of your business; and attracts visitors to your site. You can distribute the release through internet news channels such as Yahoo News, Google News, and likewise. You can also send personalized emails to the media associated with your niche. However, you must ensure that your press release contains your target keywords and is written in the most professional manner.

Start A Campaign

Pay per click advertising is a great way to generate website traffic. An online study has shown that businesses opting for this form of campaign receive the highest returns on their investment when compared to other kinds of promotional tools. However, with pay per click advertising, you must be certain that your site gives you a high conversion rate. Besides, you must set a realistic budget, along with a back end product or service that can take care of the costs for pay per click promotion and help you break-even.

Start A Blog

Once you are successful with your pay per click campaign, you must start a free or minimal cost blog. That helps you develop your natural ranking of search engine as well as attract website traffic. It assists in expanding your business. Blogging is one of the most potent SEO techniques in today’s times. Once you start your blog, you should submit the RSS feed of your blog to the submission sites as well as blog directories. Although it may take several hours for submission, it is rewarding. So, keep your patience. Blogging is a great way to bond with your audience and increase website traffic. It builds trust and lets your audience get to know you better.

Reach Web Directories

Submit your website to relevant web directories. This gets you links to your website. Link building is vital for high search engine rankings. It gives your website the much needed exposure. You need not know the entire process to push your website at the top. There are professionals trained for this task. You can use their services to handle your website promotion campaign. Once your website gets a professional touch, you would notice a difference in your website traffic.

Write Articles

One of the smartest marketing techniques is to write quality articles and publish them on other websites. Doing this has three advantages:
• it develops one way in-bound links that increases your search engine rankings
• it attracts website traffic instantly
• it creates your image as an expert in your niche

You must submit articles every week or even more frequently. See to it that the content is fresh, interesting, and keyword rich.

It’s true that attracting visitors to your website requires efforts. However, it pays astounding rewards in the end. So, if you truly wish to stay at the top for long, get ready to work hard.

Hitwise, the web analytics firm, has a report out today that claims that social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines.

Which, if the case, would imply that Google should be considerably worried about its future battle with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, as online marketing spend will surely follow Internet foot-through. Or does it? According to Hitwise, during May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%, representing the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK. At this point, it’s worth noting that Google-owned YouTube is lumped into the social networks group – is YouTube really a social network? – so that in itself significantly skews the results. But, nonetheless, social, and in particular Facebook and Twitter, continue in its ascendancy.

Facebook now accounts for 55% of all UK social networking visits, almost three times as many as the next most popular social network, which Hitwise pegs as YouTube. Twitter, on the other hand, is now the third most popular social network in the UK, putting it ahead of Bebo (no surprise) and MySpace, which seems pretty significant considering how popular the Murdoch-owned property once was with Brits.

Robin Goad, Research Director for Hitwise, comments: “although social networks and search engines perform different functions, they both act as gateways to the wider Internet. This data perfectly illustrates the key role that social media now plays in so much online behavior.” But the money isn’t yet following, with Goad noting that “the majority of online marketing spend is currently diverted towards search, and this is likely to remain the case in the short to medium term.” Search remains the “primary source of traffic for most websites”, particularly e-commerce, such as online retail, finance and travel. “Many marketers and brand owners have yet to grasp the full potential of social media marketing, but spending on the channel will increase as more proven success stories emerge.” Success stories, you say.

But can social media marketing really overcome the issue of intent? Too often, ads on YouTube and Facebook work like traditional advertising, forcing themselves onto people and interrupting the conversation or getting in the way of the content. Not only is it an issue of obtrusiveness but that advertising is out of kilter with the user’s self interest. However, when a user searches on Google, there is an intended action at the end of it, which is very often making a purchase or researching one. In which case, the interests of the user and advertiser are perfectly aligned.

Nobody is interrupting anyone. Regardless of today’s report, it’s only once somebody really figures out how to tap into intent on Facebook that Google should be worried.

Very worried.

Mitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to software development, marketing, business, social media and entrepreneurship.

After watching Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote at the Facebook F8 developers conference, it is clear that Facebook is looking to become the standard in social personalization for everything you do online. And the new social features and direction that they announced will undoubtedly have an impact on the broader world of e-commerce.

For example, their new “Like” button is already visible on over 50,000 websites, and they’re providing an API-based way to access what they’re calling a user’s “Open Graph,” which is a list of everything he or she has “liked” across the entire web — music, books, restaurants, food and more.

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The Facebook Standard

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Now here’s the fun part: Using Facebook’s API, a website can take your interests and use them to personalize your browsing experience. Better still, they don’t even have to prompt you to login to your Facebook account, thanks to the new auto-authentication feature which already lets sites like Yelp, IMDb and Pandora pull in your Open Graph data.

Until a few weeks ago, it may have sounded crazy to think that Facebook would become the standard when it comes to website personalization. But as each day goes by, it’s looking like that’s exactly what will happen.

Although there’s been concern about privacy, in my opinion, personalization will end up boosting the online shopping experience for consumers, and will provide some powerful opportunities for savvy e-commerce companies.

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What This Means for E-commerce

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Here are my five predictions for how that will happen.

1. Amazon won’t be the only online store with sophisticated personalization. Considering anyone (with permission) can pull your Open Graph via Facebook’s API, this information can be used to personalize an online store based on your past purchases, likes, and preferences quite easily. For example, our company is already working on a way to personalize the “Featured Products” area on the home page of our merchant’s stores based on their visitor’s “likes” from Facebook.

2. Facebook will start driving more traffic to some online stores than Google. With tighter Facebook integration comes more sharing by shoppers. For example, if you login to your favorite online store using Facebook, that website can automatically post to your wall when you order, write a review, or “like” a product. According to Nielsen, 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know, and Facebook’s “like” button is the perfect way to recommend a product to a friend.

3. Google will adopt Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. When you’ve got more users than anyone else, and you make your platform open, as is the case with Facebook’s new announcements, your competitors (such as Google and MySpace) will follow your lead sooner or later. I predict that Google’s search results (including product search) will soon start displaying recommendations based on data available about you in the Open Graph protocol. For example, if you search for “comedy movie” and you’ve “liked” Austin Powers, Swingers, The Love Guru, Wayne’s World and Liar Liar on IMDb, then Google will be able to use your Open Graph data as well as their own personalization algorithms to display search results that are unique to you.

4. The Open Graph is laying the foundation for wider adoption of Facebook Credits. Imagine if you could buy at any online website using Facebook Credits. Similar to how PayPal works now, you wouldn’t have to share your credit card details, and could simply use credits to pay for anything and everything you buy online. Companies like PayPal should be worried about this. While Facebook Credits are only really popular with virtual goods now, it’s only a matter of time before they provide an open platform which developers can use to facilitate payments via Facebook.

5. E-commerce conversion rates will increase. Imagine if you were looking to buy a t-shirt online and right next to the “Add to Cart” button you saw that four of your friends (along with their names and photos) had already bought the same t-shirt. This kind of marketing is priceless — it brings instant social trust to that website. If you assume the average Facebook user has 200 friends, this type of social trust factor could be huge, and Facebook’s new recommendation and “like” tools will play a huge role.

via mashable.com